Fwd: documentation-Savyasachi

Material is matter that we use to make objects for a purpose. The aim of our materials class was to experiment and explore different materials and learn a few tools that would help us later. We started with recognizing different natural joints. Joints in trees, plants, flowers. The idea was to understand different joints that we could use while working with different materials ourselves. We came across a lot of joints that we could use while working with different material though we have not tried any of them yet. I would love to work upon creating joints with different materials since it involves experimenting and playing with material.

Another project that we worked upon was to understand the strength of different materials. We worked with straw and made a bridge that could hold 8 kilo's of weight. It was an interesting process, developing different structures that we thought could take the weight, making those structures and finally coming up with one, which worked. We also understood how we should use the properties of a particular material to our advantage. For example, we understood that the straw could take more weight if it stays cylindrical and not flat.

For a day we worked with clay and practiced different methods like rolling clay, flattening to make a base and creating small sculptures with rolled threads of clay. It was a good exercise to practice molding clay.

Our final project was mold making with plaster and wax. Through this we learnt how most sculptures were made and also different ways of creating molds. We came across a lot of issues during this process, the plaster wouldn't dry, it had cracks, the object couldn't be removed from the mold and tackling all of these problems we learnt a lot about mold making through this course.

I have understood that to work with material, it's important to identify its strengths and to experiment as much as possible. Through this course we used various material except for wood and metal since the workshop space was not available. I would like to work with wood and metal in depth to understand those materials and their relationships with other material which we used during this course.

Savyasachi