Relief Sculpture

Museumsinsel und Umkreis

Cardboard

24" x 20" x 3"

Artist Statement

For this piece, I made a model of a part of Berlin, Germany, by building up layers of cardboard and playing with the different textures and structures a simple sheet of cardboard can provide. I wanted to explore a place that interests me both architecturally and culturally, but also a place I vividly relate to from my own experiences. Berlin is rich in history and its architecture reflects that, so I really wanted to reflect how with a single medium and monochrome color scale an otherwise colorful and bustling city can still come to life. From my own personal experience, I remember walking and driving through the streets and looking at many old and modern buildings, each creating different vibes throughout the city yet still being cohesive as one place. By using just brown cardboard and simple elements without going into too much detail I felt that I created that sort of feeling. I also had a personal connection to the medium, although I didn't realize it till after I started working, as I used German cardboard moving boxes we used to move the US several years ago.

This project required a lot of planning and sketching to get to a point where I could actually start the process of building up, since my scale is quite big and the buildings intricate. I used only cardboard for the entire model, and tried to make sure that I used the same side of cardboard every time, as one side was tinted in a more orange tone and also had a different texture. In addition to simple cardboard boxes, I had a large collection of unique pieces of cardboard that came with furniture shipments and other orders that I have collected over time. These allowed me to easily create and incorporate different textures and forms that were true and natural to the medium, in other words I did not have to alter them in anyway. Since cardboard does not hold well and I have several tall and complicated structures, I needed to use hot glue as it was fast drying and held well. This presented several problems along the way, however, as I consistently burned my fingers and also got globs of glue where I didn't want them.

The process of creating this piece required a lot research, as I was trying to replicate, as best as possible, an actual city to scale. My first step of the process was figuring out which part of Berlin I wanted to model, keeping in mind the most interesting and intriguing structures, so I found the drawing tool on google earth, which allowed me to draw on the map and scale down the area I wanted to model. This next step was more time consuming than the actual building of structures, as I had to take an image of the part of Berlin that I was going to model and increase the scale by three or four times as I drew, so I constantly had to revise and adjust to make everything ft to scale. Over the course of my project, I did not change my idea much, as I was entirely basing it on a real place and did not have much of a plan from the get-go. This mindset did allow me to experiment with my medium however, and the more buildings I made, the more I tried different pieces of cardboard and started to cut, rip and deconstruct the layers, which exposed new textures.