Urbanisation Presentation 1

Urbanisation is a project which has been morphed around the themes of conflict between urbanisation and the environment. The term urbanisation means the growth and development of city living, and I wanted to portray the consequences that come with it, and the contest with the natural world. I have designed an exhibition in the Auckland Domain wintergardens to encourage scrutiny over our rapidly growing city. I am proposing a collection of formations throughout the gardens, each with a different format. I am exploring the idea of tactile experience and the benefits of learning through touch. I plan to engage all of the separate spaces in the gardens; The pergolas, the glass houses, the fernery and the courtyard, All of my aspects revolve around frosted, stained and textured glass surfaces. My pergola installation reveals a corroding array of coloured textured glass panels suspended above, creating a sequence of colour refractions along the path as the sun moves across the sky, as well as textural engagement with the surface treatments.

Further inside the gardens, within fernery, I am working with the idea of hosting large similar glass panels, with plant cell patterns on the glass itself. These will be raised upon concrete/stone-like plinths as seen in my earlier clay sequence. I took inspiration from these models and decided that by having them as a base for my glass microscopic displays, they would appear to be either corroding around the glass, as a visual representation of decay within natural materials, and out rises an artificial version of nature, with the visuals of plants but without the properties, purely for aesthetic, similarly to how cities build over destructed nature, and try to synthesize and fabricate the natural world.

Finally I want to activate the courtyard and the interior of the glasshouses through the use of projection and image mapping on the frosted glass. I will be sourcing or designing abstract imagery, and hope to represent deterioration of natural elements, I have painted a stream of water breaking apart here, but the projection will be a loop of moving and morphing imagery which can be seen from nearly all areas of the gardens, interior and exterior (excluding the fernery).

Moving forward I hope to either narrow down my ideas in to one that is more fluent and addresses my issue clearly, either this or find a way to tie my 3 ideas together harmoniously. I will hopefully be experimenting with glass making and printing within the coming weeks, and look further in to the microscopic prints of certain plants and making them work within the winter gardens theme and layout.