Abstraction - Material Exploration

Hi all! Thanks for checking in and exploring this Instructable. Today, we are going to be working with different types of material to create a cohesive art piece. The purpose of this project is to explore the affordances and abilities of various materials when making physical art. The ideal goal is to expose yourself to different ways to create art, step out of your material comfort zone, and create an entirely unique piece of art.

Now, there should be some background information to why I created this project. This piece of art is a part of a speculative future, a future where everything is different than what we know life as today. Imagine for a moment that you are 300 years in the future and the world has been split into five provinces within a larger district named Yigdrasil. Each human will spend their life cycling through the provinces and expanding their knowledge of the world. Each cycle takes 5 years, where a human will completely immerse themselves in the ideologies of their province.

This project takes place in The Arachnid Institute province, a province dedicated to teaching students and focus on what can be within Yigdrasil. Now imagine you are taking a first-year university level course within this province that is focused on material exploration. You can watch the video above to get some more insight into this class, as well as see some initial designs.

Now lets get started!

• Any type of glass, I got mine off of Amazon
• Fabric squares
• Concrete powder for coloring
• Acrylic paints
• Wood
• Concrete
• Polyurethane
• Gloves

For my design process I used Adobe Illustrator, but feel free to use a pencil and paper, or any kind of drawing technique that allows you to visualize your finalized design.

As you can see, I attempted a few different ideas before settling on the final one (the second photo). Initially, I was going to do four square pieces each made of different materials. There would be gaps between the pieces but the eye would be draw to the similar shapes between pieces.

After some revision, I felt like I wanted even more cohesion and created the overlapping design you see above. I felt like this allowed me to play with more 3D shapes that would create depth on a 2D surface. If you are building your own piece, feel free to use my design but I really do encourage you to create your own! That is what will make it the most interesting for you.

Now, you could easily just buy a wood slab that fits the dimensions you want. Or you could but a few smaller pieces of wood, like I did, and glue them together.

I purchased small wooden sticks from my local hardware store. To create a perfectly flat piece of wood, two pieces had to be glued together. It should be noted that I finished my wood before gluing it, but is not the correct way to do it. In hindsight, I advise you glue the wood and then finish it. The glue will work better if it is on unfinished wood.

First, I sanded the wood to create smooth surface. Then I covered each piece of wood in a Polyurethane coat, which is essentially just a clear finishing coat. Make sure to wear gloves when doing this! I started without gloves and quickly realized my mistake!

Then after the pieces were dry, I used a super glue to connect the two pieces together.

After the singular pieces were glued to create a solid piece, I then glued all the pieces together to create a slab. You can see that the pieces of wood weren't sticking very well and that has to do with the fact that I finished the wood before gluing it. So once again, finish your wood last.

I first created a solid mold for my concrete using a piece of insulation and leftover wood sticks. I would actually recommend NOT using insulation, but we had it lying around and it since we know how to work with insulation, we decided to use it. An alternative way to use it is to just use the wood pieces with clamps to keep the corners in tact. Make sure you do this outside or somewhere that you don't mind getting messy!

I asked for help on this part of the project, but it is definitely something you could do on your own with proper research! We dug out our mold with a screw driver and vacuumed up the excess insulation. Then we placed our wood sticks inside to solidify the walls.

We mixed 1 part water and 1 part concrete in a red solo cup to create our concrete. We are skilled with concrete and know the dangers, but please wear gloves if you are not! Concrete can burn your skin if not properly washed off.

You can see that we poured the concrete into our mold and then spread it around with a spare wood piece. It is not shown, but we used four cups of concrete before we were happy with the height.

I let the concrete sit for 24 hours before taking it out. I ended up with a crack in the concrete that split it in two. I repaired it with a heavy duty glue and let it sit for another 24 hours.

To cut glass, you need a special glass cutting tool (pictured above). I found one on amazon for about $10 that worked okay. Turns out, you also need a special oil when cutting glass and I didn't purchase the oil. Even without the oil, I was able to split the glass, but it made the outcome a little bit more uneven that I would have hoped for.

However, as you can see, I got the glass to split in order to create a red corner and a white piece with no corner. I then used super glue to connect the two pieces to create one solid piece again. The design is flipped in the images above but the red corner will actually be on the right side of the final piece. Refer to the initial diagram if you need a reminder!

This was the easiest step of them all, requiring only paper, a ruler, a pencil, and some scissors. Basically all I did was cut the largest piece of paper to a slightly smaller size. I then took the yellow paper and cut out a triangle, measuring exactly where I wanted it to hit on the white piece of paper. To continue the illusion and attempt to have no width, I cut the white paper and then taped the yellow paper in the hole I had created.

I then did the same thing with the red paper, creating the shape based off my initial schematics.

An easy step! Just cut and paste!

Fabric was particularly difficult for me, though if you have some previous sewing skills, it may be a lot easier for you! To make this piece, I cut the corner off the blue square of fabric and then sewed it back together with a matching red corner.

To sew it back together, I pinched the two pieces of fabric together and then used a thick needle to create looped stitches. You can see that there is a bit of bunching that made the corner shrink in slightly. I hid this pretty easily when I sewed the back piece on by just bunching the back piece a little more than usual.

I sewed the back piece on on three and a half sides, leaving a small opening for stuffing. It is not in the video above since my stuffing came in late, but I then stuffed the fabric to create a pillow and then sewed it shut. This created a really fun little pillow that added some depth to the overall piece.

You can see that my stitches are a little sloppy, but that is just because I don't have a lot of experience sewing! I found that even at the end of the third side, my stitches had improved a lot so if you don't know how to sew that well, just stick with it!

This part was the easiest but did take a long time! I used acrylic paint to draw lines to connect the different materials. The idea was to create a cohesive art piece with different materials. The paints went on slightly different colors due to the nature of the materials themselves.

Between each color I made sure to clean the brush with water and a paper towel.

And now your final piece is complete! If you re-created my design or did something on your own, share it with me so I can see how you did it! I hope you had fun working with new materials and discovered something new about a material. I know that for me, this project pushed my boundaries in working with different materials. And at the end of it, I found out that while I really enjoyed working with concrete, I still prefer digital design over physical design.

Total active working time:

• 8 hours planning and ordering
• 2 hours concrete
• 2 hours wood
• 1 hour glass
• 30 minutes paper
• 3 hours fabric
• 2 hours painting

Total waiting time:

• 48 hours concrete drying
• 120 hours waiting on Amazon
• 2 hours wood glue drying

Total active: 18.5 hours

Total waiting: 170 hours

Total time: 188.5 hours