Sharing

I inherited Sally's transparent squished ball. She had printed on the acetate and cut it into strips, sort of pumpkin shaped.



I liked the idea of transparency and had not worked with plastic yet this quarter, so I thought that was the way to go. I had also recently taken some photos of light rainbows on our walls and wondered if I could include some colored light into the project. But what to do? maybe plant shapes? growing? maybe fan shapes?



At some point I thought of this line someone had posted on Twitter; "What color is the wind?" I really liked that idea and thought, "I'm borrowing materials, why not borrow the inspiration?" I'll use plastic to represent the wind. I can add colored LED lights -- the colors I found were red, blue, and green -- the colors of light, which together in their pure form equal white (or clear). How perfect I thought!



I sketched some sail type shapes and started to construct it. After spending a bit on time on the project I realized that how I was going about it and with the materials I had, it was not going to look like how I envisioned it. So scraped the wind idea for now.



I then thought of something Sally had said, she thought her object was kind of sea creature like and I agreed with her. I thought back to last fall when I visited the Monterey Aquarium and how I loved the jelly fish, anemone, and other sea life. I thought of making tubes out of plastic and how the small lights I had made them glow. So I decided to just have fun with the materials I had and play, probably creating some kind of sea plant.



I added some flowy plastic strips coming out of the base where the tubes of light were "planted," in part to cover the Styrofoam base and also to create a more organic form.



I like how it looks, even though I realize it looks a bit like a cheesy Christmas decoration. I don't like that it's really put together without a lot of finesse, plain old scotch tape is pretty much holding the whole thing together.