Relief Sculpture

"BANANA TREE"

Various cardboards, assembled with hot glue

1"x 8"x 5"

The main inspiration for this piece was the Chiquita Banana stickers that I see just about everywhere. I see them under desks, on t-shirts, phone cases, friends foreheads and on the bananas in my kitchen every morning. I drew inspiration from that and wanted to create something related to bananas. I originally wanted to create a banana or cluster of bananas, but I wasn't sure my cardboard sculpting talents were there yet. So I decided to create just a Cavendish banana tree and a small cluster of bananas under it. Cavendish banana trees look very similar to palm trees and are rather small in size and sometimes people have them in pots like in my sculpture. There was no real message in my work but I wanted it to be something that you could recognize right away and something that was kind of relaxing and not chaotic.

The materials I used were pretty basic just cardboard and hot glue. I used a different color cardboard for the pot to get some contrast into the sculpture but other than that it was all cardboard from an old Nike shoe box which ironically held bananas this one time we went camping. I wanted to use a material that wasn't going to be too hard to use or sculpt and something that was cheap or I had a lot of. Cardboard was the perfect answer to all my questions. I used hot glue to assemble and hold everything together because it seemed like the best option. Especially in the pot where I had some curled cardboard that desperately wanted to uncurl.

I made several sketches on different pieces of paper through out the process and some of these sketches I've lost and all of them were fairly crude. However I really had a hard time piecing together how I would create the banana cluster as these are not an easy thing to picture. Not to mention there is a surprising lack of bananas on the tree images on google. I had to rely on my memory from when me and my friend Harvey would go and steal bananas from our neighbor's tree. I eventually came to a conclusion of how I wanted it to look and I traced out some shapes on cardboard and cut them out. The sculpture is rather layered and I wanted all of the pieces to be the same even if they weren't organized in the same way so I created a tree to trace to get the other parts. Once they were all cut out I peeled away some layers of cardboard to reveal the corrugated look for the palm fronds. Finally I hot glued all the pieces together.