Sculptures of Spring '08

Emily Bzdyk

Project 3- Site / Place

My work is about a place that I visited. Over spring break, I went to Belize. My work is a physical representation of memory and ideas and feelings, as well as recognizable elements of the place I went. I went to Belize for a biology class. We desgined our own research projects and then conducted our research in the field. The trip had a very biological focus, needless to say, and we saw many interesting physical places and animals. When you go to a place, there are many aspects that stick with you after you leave. You may notice a smell, but not be able to recall it later. There are the visual element of the space, colors, forms, light, objects, animals plants, basically everything visiable. There is also sound to consider. In Belize there were bird calls and the infinite sounds of the jungle. For my trip, I did not bring music. Music is a huge part of my life, and it was a very noticeable missing element. However, as we traveled to an island by boat, my friend handed me her ipod and had me listen to a song. Being one of the very few songs I heard on the trip, it became deeply associated with my experinces in Belize. The song is “Getysburg” by Ratatat. When I hear it, it has a strong link to my trip and all the feelings associated with it. This music will probably only conjure up these feelings for me, which will create a disconnect between me and my audience, but that is the nature of art in mnay cases.

When I was in Belize, I learned a lot about myself. I learned to be self dependant in mnay ways I was unable to be before. Being separated from ones I loved was a huge thing. I had no phone or internet, no contact with the ousdie world for some time. This had a very profound affect on me. The way we spent each day was very natural to how I believed life should be. We woke up with the sun, interacted with our environment, with fieldwork or birdwatching. We ate at specific times, and only a certain amount. When it was dark, we went to bed or used flashlights. It was very refreshing to live that way, and also very primitive at times, which made me notice many things about the way I normally live. These lessons all were with me when I created the work, but they aren’t the subject of the work.
My source material came from my study focus. In the first place, Hill bank field station, we were studying ants. There were ants everywhere too, that I noticed throughout the trip and photographed. I have always loved ants, ever since I can remember I have loved to watch them. The leavcutter ants are mesmerizing to me. They work as a team to complete defoliate entire forests, carrying the leaves piece by piece to underground chambers. They then process the leaves and ceate gardens to grow a fungus which they then harvest and consume. The whole area is covered with winding tiny paths where the ants walk with their leaves. We found one path with ants carrying yellow flower petals. You see these ribbons of tiny moving color pieces, and it is an amazing expericne to watch the ants at work. But that’s me, again. I’m a biologist, who is fascinated by ants. So I thought about how this trip helped me recoonect with these parts of myself. I realized on this trip that I should probably go to grad school, and maybe study entomology.

My trip had such a large affect on my life and I wanted to create a physical representation. I decided to make ants because of what they represent to me in terms of my future, and how life is organized, and my interest in them as organisms. My work is a model, though it can function as a piece on many levels. It is meant as a half inch scale site piece. The site itself is a sparsely forested landscape, like the trees across the path from Montgomery Hall by the bell tower. The ants would be cast bronze and sheet metal. The colored panels could be any number of materials, though I would prefer a cloth or natural material, despite its degradability. The ants carrying the colored forms are the worker leafcutter ants. They come from my observations of the ants in Belize. The huge ant nearby represents a leader or master figure, and comes from an ant I saw and photographed at a Mayan ruin. This piece will probably mean many things to different audience, and unfortunately will not have the rich meaning for others that it does for me. The song I described above is playing to add an extra layer of experience to the piece. The song has a very emotional and powerful meaning for me now. Music is one of those deeply embedded communications of emotion and feeling, and can affect people in very profound ways.
This work has to do with a memory, or imagined space, and a physical representation of my own experience and thoughts. To use recognizable figures means the audience will bring their own contextual meaning to this piece. It will only truly and fully represent the place I intended to me, because experience and memory are very personal things. However, I feel this work is successful in my intention of physically representing a memory of a place, which for me was defined by the ants I saw, and to me were one of the largest parts of my environment. The idea of making insect large is also very appealing, because I don’t feel people notice insects as much as I do, and I think they are fascinating. Making ants giant would make them something a viewer has to confront.