YSP

YSP

We visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to have a look at all the different artists sculptures set up there. We took photos for research purposes and created collages based on our favourite ones. After going around the whole park we chose our favourite exhibition and artist. Mine was Ai Weiwei and his animal heads sculpture because of the history behind them and also how well executed the sculptures were. We had to create three letter forms from the chosen sculpture or artist and the one I chose too was a little difficult as it did not exactly relate to that sculpture but another piece of work by Weiwei. I based the letter forms of his 'Dropping a Dynasty Urn' piece as I felt like I had more opportunities to play with this. In this piece he takes a really old and valuable Chinese urn and smashes it on the ground so that's exactly what we did but the cheaper version. Once we had done so we re-arranged the shards into our chosen word and photographed it and also made a full alphabet from those shards. We used the word Zodiac given its relation to the sculpture park. Those heads were symbols for the zodiac signs Scorpio, Virgo, Leo, Cancer and so on and so forth. For the third letter form I decided to look into Chinese calligraphy and created an animated GIF out of it. I transformed the style of the Chinese calligraphy but put it into English and wrote the word Zodiac and it also had the plates smashed appearing over the top of it as well the link it all together. The way I like to think of it is the smashed plates are a modern version of his sculpture and the calligraphy is an old fashioned tradition best known for by the Chinese. At the exhibition, some of the sculptured heads were traditional ones and some were modern re-makes given that they all could not be found and that is how we made the difficult link between his work and ours.