For my final piece, I wanted to create an object representing gentrification out of cardboard boxes that I have found at home.
I was inspired to experiment with the idea of gentrification from my visits to galleries for research, such as the collage, mural-like piece at 'A Museum of Modern Nature' in the Welcome Collect and the piece 'Monument for the Living' by Marwan Rechmaoui in the Tate Modern.
Gentrification is the process of renovating a district to conform to middle-class taste but unfortunately, this also means evicting many original residents who cannot afford these new "improvements" and overall taking away the history and culture of the area, as I've mentioned in a previous post.
For the design of my piece, I was heavily inspired by Rechmaoui's monument and its strong but simple structure. Through sketches, my first idea was to have a tall building on top of a residential house, but through further developments, I decided that I wanted to create a couple of buildings on top. This represents residential areas and cultures of their previous residents being built on top of and adding to the already many skyscrapers and complexes of compact cities.
To depict people being forced out of their homes against their will, I wanted to create my piece with cardboard boxes as it represents packing all your belonging and moving.
I found loads of cardboard boxes and started to cut out templates for creating buildings and the house.
In the studio on Wednesday, I started by hot-gluing these pieces together to create the structures of the buildings and the house. Once I constructed these pieces I angled the bases of the buildings so they would stand straight on the angled roof of the house.
I decided to cover the house with the tape because I like the meaning it gave to the house, saying to take care and have the compassion to those living in the places about to be gentrified. The worded tape was also inspired by Wadsworth Jarrel's paintings in the Tate and his use of words to portray his message.
When first constructing the house I decided to put a door and windows that opened, however later I decided I did not like this and decided to cover them up with 'handle with care' packaging tape, as I found it gave the piece a more minimalistic but still graphic, strong look.
In my initial designs, I had planned to cut out windows in the buildings using a craft knife, however, due to time I was unable to do so. So instead on one of the buildings, I started to draw windows on with black pen, however, I decided I did not like this look and it took away from the minimal aesthetic I wanted to achieve. I considered removing this building from my design but instead I started to rip off the first layer of cardboard of the building, this achieved a very textured look and almost mimicked floor levels of an actual building. I feel this added dimensions to the look that I initially hadn't thought of but I really like how these textured incorporated into my piece.
I finally glued all the pieces together and photographed my final outcome around Ravensbourne.
Overall, I am happy with my final outcome and what I was able to achieve physically and contextually for the given time frame of this project. I feel like the mistakes I made during this process added to my piece and actually improved it. Even though producing physical 3D pieces is not something I'm particularly strong at, I feel this piece came out how I wanted it to
