Portfolio: Sculpture Studio

Rachael Lashof

Project 2- Kinetics and Interactivity

Throughout this semester, I have been interested in exploring how I can portray the scientific as artistic, the objective as subjective, and vice versa. For this project, I used an idea from my digital art project (LINK), fluorescent orchid. I expanded on the idea of genetic manipulation of the plant organism by not only showing it as fluorescent in color, but by questioning who does the manipulating.

Manipulating genes, though it may seem to be a precise, clean task, can be dirty and difficult work. I used a piece pulled from the junk yard – a car window handle, to suggest this. The window handle must be turned by the viewer to raise and lower the fake plant from its pot. The fake plant was used to express the surrealness of genetic manipulations. Though many species are genetically manipulated, particularly plant species, we must remember that these organisms are not natural. Finally, I mounted the project on the wall so that the shelf was at just below eye level. I did this so that the average viewer could not see into the pot, and thus could not see the plant before that raised it using the window crank.

Overall, I think this project was successful because it expressed my idea of human involvement in the process of plant growth. However, I also feel that this project was unsuccessful in that it was not specific enough about the type of human involvement I wanted to portray. In order to show how human can genetically manipulate organisms, I could exaggerate the surrealness of the plant. This could be done by making human fingers or another unexpected organism or part of an organism growing from the plant. The unexpectedness of this I hope would add shock factor to the piece and suggest how unreal manipulating organisms could possibly be.