Relief Project

The main idea that guided this artwork is the story of the Hecatoncherires, also known as the 100-handed ones, from Greek mythology. As it most commonly goes, in the beginning, there was only the entity known as caose. The first two beings to be formed were Gaia and Tartarus, the earth and a hellish space under it. Gaia grew lonely and created the sky, Uranus, who she fell in love with. The sky and earth's first three children were the Hecatoncheire, monsters with 50 faces and 100 arms. Uranus was discussed by his monster children so he banished them down to the pits of Tartarus. With my artwork I wanted to depict the prosses of a hecatoncheirs reaching up and out to the sky and earth trying to cling to anything that will stop his descent, this is in vain as there is nothing around to grasp. With this artwork I tryed to depict how desperate not to fall the hecatoncheires were, still the sky showed no mercy.  

Out of all the projects I did this year this was one of the most fun to make. The piece is made up out of tin foil and paper hands that look like mine because that's what I used to make them. To make the tinfoil hands I wrapped up my own hand with tinfoil, molding it tightly to my skin and hot gluing on extra pieces where there were gaps. To remove it after I wrapped my hand I cut it down the side like a cast and hot glued it back together. In the piece, there are more left arms then right because I'm right-hand dominant and it was far easier to wrap the opposite hand. For the paper hands, I traced my underarms onto a large piece of paper and stacked it, giving me many many paper hands. I secured everything together onto one base piece of paper with hot glue. 

I've had the idea of creating some sort of hand sculpture since the beginning of 3D design, I contemplated creating a paper mashaie hand for both the paper reflection and paper sculpture projects. However I decided against it because paper mashaie can be hard to deal with in terms of cleaners and materials needed, but I could finally use my hand idea in this project since I was not restricted to a specific material. I did research a bit by reading a bit online about the hecatoncheire and Tartarus to refresh my memory on the story, that is how I came up with all the hands trying to reach out but grabbing nothing. When putting together the piece I laid out paper hands around a sized paper base to make them a sort of backdrop, I think this can convey the idea of falling better since there is nothing visible to stop the decent. The tin foil and some paper hands reach out grasping each other, further showing that there is nothing saving the hecatoncheire.