SI #3 (Rooted at the Heart)

The idea behind this work was to make a wire tree that was sort of wacky and crazy looking but still made sense and conveyed meaning. I wanted to give it that sort of old, crazy tree look, where all the branches curve and there's knots and things. I got my inspiration from pinterest, I just sort of was browsing for ideas and I saw this sort of thing, I had seen it before but this time it kind of stood out to me. we had been working with wire a bit in foundations before this and I despised it, but it was because we had to make it stand up, and we had to use fishhook connections, whereas here, we were able to do whatever we wanted. I thought coils looked fun so I tried it. 

I used copper twenty-two gauge wire for the tree.  I thought the copper looked really cool, and the gauge was just right, because the twenty-eight gauge didn't really stand up on it's own so for the single strands at the end it may not have worked. It was just so think that I'm not sure it even would have stood up and not bent even when so much of it was coiled together. The other option was a thicker eighteen gauge which was way to thick. With the amount of coils I wanted, it would have been at least six inches in diameter. Then, I wanted to use a riack as the base as you can see in my idea generation, but that didn't work out as planned so I ended up using a small bust I found in the closet.

I started out wanting to make it connect to the sides of a picture frame, as if it was a wire drawing, and the branches and roots would hold onto the frame, but then I thought it would be cool if it was on something natural, as if it could actually be growing in such a place if the tree was real. So a rock was gathered, but It didn't really work how I wanted. I wanted the roots to wrap around it and really hug the shape of the rock so that the tree would stand, but that was not happeneing, and the roots were to long for the rock. I tried gluing it down, but the glue didn't stick to the rock. I tried using the thin wire to almost tie it to the rock but that didn't work very well either and it looked bad. So after a whole class of trial and error with that, I decided to scrap that and use a log instead. I couldn't find one though. So I rummaged through Mr. Andreson's supply closet and found this small styrofoam bust that I thought could be cool if I painted it. So I did, seeing if I could use colors to give the illusion of light from the heart then attached the tree so that it almost looked like the tree was growing from the person's heart.