Its Growing!

As litter continues to delicately pile onto the "Tidal Wave of Trash" it is slowly beginning to look more and more like the real-deal.

Here are progress photos of the wave in different lighting. Its been a very slow process sewing the garbage on, but as it builds it becomes clearer and clearer that our efforts are worthwhile. The trash seems to float on the structure, and the directional angles that the bits are placed are giving it a nice upward motion, as though the pollution is being sucked up into the curl.

We are gradually filling in the holes. We have tried to evenly space the blue and green assortments but wanted to make sure the inside was focused on the most so that the viewer will get a strong representation of our cause by walking through the barrel. 

Here is the back of the wave in a more primary stage. You can see the color gradient we are forming by placing darker colors on the bottom and having the value gradually shift to lighter tones as it moves up into the white water. 

Since our greens and blues are starting to become scarce, we have decided to incorporate the large pile of black that we have separated. Adding the black is of course darkening the wave, but in turn it is giving it this grimace mood that is starting to give it a very daunting appearance. This is starting to neutralize the appearance of the color so that it does not become too cartoonish or psychedelic.

Along with blacks we are incorporating a lot of our silvers and more reflective materials onto the back of the wave so that it will shine brightly in the sun when the light catches it. This will imitate the natural effects of a wave as the ripples on the back of the wave sparkle in the sunlight.

Being our first project of this kind, we are often recognizing things we wished we had done differently or different approaches to take. If time had allowed it, it would have been nice to have hyper-sorted the colors by value and intensity and laid it out as a puzzle of sorts to basically "paint" with varieties of colored trash. That would have taken much more time than we could afford though, its crunch time as it is. There are 5 work days left until the parade!

Regardless of what we missed out on doing for this sculpture, knowing how much room for improvement there is has acted as a fiery motivation to start another project after this one. Its exciting to see how naturally devoted and immersed in this project we are. Though our studio looks like a garbage dump, we constantly compare ourselves to Charlie Brown's Pig Pen due to the flies that we have discovered fancy us after a long days work, and my dreams have even been consumed with a mixture of trash an needle nightmares, it feels good. It feels darn good. 

We feel like we are doing something worthwhile, utilizing our talents to do our part in the preservation of the planet. Every friend that has lent a hand to sew on some trash always seems to walk away with the same feeling. We are creating and involved with something powerful, disgusting, and beautiful. 

More progress photos to come soon.

Feel free to leave us comments and do share any advice!