Yorkshire Sculpture Park - Negative Space, Silhouettes and Sculpture forms within Type

To start this module, we were to design three 3D typographic designs in response to an exhibition that is currently in Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Firstly, we explored and experimented on creating 3D sculptures ourselves using collages and prints. Following a trip to the park, we decided to create our 3D typographic forms on ‘Occasional Geometries’. This exhibition was curated by Rana Begum and was centred on abstract minimal installations which lends itself to the movement of the audience, various perspectives, changing light and the relation of different work that are spaced out in the exhibition. After doing further research on the exhibition, we decided to create our three 3D typographic forms on the theme of grid systems while interlinking the idea of relationships between work and minimalism shown in the exhibition.

For our first typographic form, we decided to use tape on tiled walls to effectively show the geometric lines when used on grid system. We decided to use existing structures to create our typographic forms which links to the exhibition’s influence, which is Richard Wentworth’s work ethic of “isolating an object that already exists, bringing together and stage-managing found things not usually related to art...” Using existing structures made it easy for us to create letterforms as we already have a template or guideline for the letterforms that we were creating, also it restricted us in a way that we could only make straight line and could only make them go up down and diagonally. However, at one point we did try and create letter from going away from the tiles and onto the grided floor and tried to create a more 3D shaped structure- although in my opinion it didn’t really work as it looked awkward and too forced.

                         

I however, developed the idea digitally by finding the most common shapes used and created various letter forms gradually simplifying them as I experimented quite a few times.

I think these designs were the more successful ones as they are not too similar to the work they came from but also took the elements of the shapes quite well while looking very simplistic and clean.

Similarly, to the previous idea our second idea also uses a grid system in order to create the word "CONNECT" from wool. Using wool gave us the freedom to loop it and bend it however we want as opposed to the tape. However, this idea was very time consuming and we used a fence with small squares which made it harder to loop the wool around it, which I think made this idea nor quite successful and refined as we had liked it too.

However, I thought the lines made by the wool could create a spaced out jagged pattern when inversely cut into letterforms; also by making the letterforms black and white the textures are highlighted and gives the letterforms some 3D elements to it.

Our third idea was the theme of “perspective” and relationship between each work in the exhibition, which was strongly shown in the exhibition. We still took the tape-like letterforms as inspiration but linked them together digitally in order to create a sculpture like structure and overlaid the design on top of one of the exhibitions (Jesse Darling’s ‘March of the Valedictorians’). This puts the design in some context, where it’s put in a situation where different structural forms can be seen and formed while a viewer may be moving around the sculpture itself. If I were to develop this idea further I would start to look at the sculpture with the overlaid design to see if various letterforms can be created while going around and possibly seeing it in different perspective and angles.