Sustained Investigation 2

"Plight Of The Ocean"

foam, super glue, wire, hot glue, modpodge, newspaper, nat geo articles

This project evolved heavily and I got severely concussed half way through, which lengthened the process by at least a week. My original sketches for this proeject depeicted a fish skeleton made out of wire and paper mache. It then evolved into a mahi mahi, then a wahoo. When I finally got my hands on the foam and realized how hard it was to carve I decided to change my design to a more obscure shape that can mearely be seen as a fish.

The process for this project was long and tedious and I kept going back to the drawing board on my design. I finally started by hot-gluing some pieces of foam together, then I drew my design on the foam and started carving. The carving stage of my design took much longer than anticipated and many swears were said as carving foam is one of the most mind numbing, frustrating processes in the modern world. Finally, when I had carved out the rough shape that would serve as a base for my sculpture, I dropped it on the ground where it snapped in several pieces. I glued the pieces that snapped off back and used wire to re-enforce it while I started to add newspaper with modpodge as my adhesive. When I had wrapped the body I used cardboard and pins to create fins that stuck into the foam of the fishes body. When the shape was finished I thought I was going to paint it, however because of my shape that didn't resemble any real fish I had to reconsider my idea. I had just gone through my National Geographic archives and found some articles about overfishing, sea pollution and how the oceans are dying. I felt it would be more meaningful to wrap the fish in that instead.

A big challenege for this project was deciding what to create, like I said I drew and redrew my design idea for this many times. Another challenege was carving foam and I will never do that again. No amount of beauty is worth that fight. I'm really proud of how this turned out and yet it takes a keen eye to notice the articles on the fish, once you've seen it you can't unsee it. This project is by no means anti-tuna fishing, some of my best friends have caught them and I know it is an industry that many people in this country rely on, this piece is merely cauting against overfishing.