Just one week before the crit, that day’s studio with Leigh was dedicated just to a group assessment to self-judge our sketchbooks and/or research and to discuss whether our idea, our outcome at that point and our audience-target were good enough.
In general as a group we endured a very harsh critic from our tutor. For me though it wasn’t so bad as he believed that my chosen audience and the vessel’s environment were on the right track and to the point.
As I was trying to design a product in order to raise awareness for the elephants and how we are killing them for their tusks to create jewels and products for tourists, I came up with the idea of my environment to be a tourist bazaar with stalls and various shops with trinkets and jewels and stuff like that. I’ve imagined “myself” to be an animal welfare organization that has a campaign and in order to focus on the irony of the fact that we are killing a majestic creature for trinkets that we don’t need, decides to place the campaign on a tourist bazaar. so my audience would be tourists and my item would be given free to them.
In addition, I wanted to use an environment friendly material as my vessel so I had already made a wooden box using the 3D workshop with my logo engraved on it using the laser cut.
At that point, I was still trying for my first idea to make it work.
My original and first idea:
I wanted to create 4 little elephant sculptures made out of a material that could dissolve in water. Then I wanted to place inside them little pendants that I made out of wire wrapped in a tree of life shape . So if you opened my box you would find inside 4 elephants and a small leaflet with IKEA-ish instructions that would inform you to put the elephant in water and wait for a specific amount of time specified on the leaflet. After that time you would find in the water my little pendant, to show you in a “poetic” way that you’ve just destroyed an elephant in order to purchase a pendant. I didn’t want to walk you through to what my manifesto is. I wanted for the tourists (in that case) to see and experience for themselves.
So I had my box and my pendants made but still I was trying to make the elephants, at that point.
Marialena 