Encyclopedias - sand sculpture

I have a 3.5 year old son and his brain is the most amazing device I have ever seen in action. He only has to overhear me saying something once for the synapses to fire and the knowledge is indexed and stored away in his noggin to be quickly accessed at a moments notice. As i get older i find it harder and harder to grasp information. For every new thing I learn it seems that I have to make room and forget something else.

At the moment I am trying to learn to use Blender (open source 3D software) and as I watch tutorials my head becomes a cloud of information swimming around and most of it not settling to a resting place in my head. It seems to wash over me and I look on in wonder unable to retain it.

My little man is processing so fast I think he is a genius (All parents probably have the same perception of their child). Dinosaurs are his thing and he knows every one. Each given a chapter in his brain which seems like an encyclopedia with a hypertext index. I don;t even know where he learns it all. What I wouldn't give to go back to when my mind was a notebook with still so many unfilled pages.

The booking for the book of books

This Project, in a typical shopping center in Wijnegem, Belgium was about books and @stijgerart . Edith Van Der Wetering and myself were given the challenge to make a sculpture based on encyclopedias.

As a subject mater it was a nice one because as books they can be anything and we were not restricted to making characters or story lines to form some sort of illustration ie. we could take it anywhere we wanted and try and show the essence of what these books mean to us.

Diagram

The concept behind the piece was illustrative in certain ways, like many encyclopedias in fact, but with our twist. The information from these books of knowledge gets fed into your head and then inside we decided to show what happens, The muddle of letters is processed into your own books of memories and then stored away for later retrieval. ( In theory anyway).

In Dutch I believe they have a saying about eating books meaning that you consume the information they hold and this was our starting point. We were having alot of fun, well, at least up until the moment the Belgian girl I was going out with at the time broke up with me and my heart took a beating. One evening she met with me and said 'it's over'. Three years and that was that.

Processing the processor

The sand was really nice to work with and even though I usually prefer to work outside the shopping center allowed us to work in nice unchanging light and without the fear that the rain would come and mess up our surface textures.

The large head was carved smooth then using a hose the surface was textured to give a pore effect then text was drawn back on by smoothing the surface again. A nice delicate effect.

Getting out of my head and into another

Inside the head we decided to do some sort of devices showing how the information is processes and stored away with lots of textures to give it depth and as a nod to the our subject mater paper annotations turning it into a illustration.
We really goofed off on the detail and although I was heart broken over my lose of relationship I began to really enjoy my work and find in that some comfort. Throwing oneself into your work should be one of the five stages of grief... Ok, maybe the sixth stage.

Breaking up is never easy and I was in complete shock of how it happened but having my work and some great friends around me really helped me see that things were not all as shit as I was feeling them to be. In years to come when I met @clodaghdowning and we instantly clicked I realised that everything happens for a reason and I can't imagine me being happier with any other , especially now with our genius son in tow.

Closing the book

The sculpture was finished with an old leather bound book feel showing how revered that these type of books are.

I really liked that in the shopping center the sculpture could be looked on from so many angles and we made sure our design was worked form all of them.

In life I think it is important to try and look at things from many different angles and from other peoples perspectives.Like the sculpture, if the relationship wasn't working for the other person then how could it ever work for me in the long term.

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Ps

Thanks for reading. I use Steem to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, among other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Steem blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.

The Lion King - sand sculpture

Pillow Talk - music video

The first breakfast nativity - sand sculpture

I hope you'll join me again soon.
@ammonite