Category: Assignments

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Course summary – Elliot Bellis

In-class presentation

My previous experience with drawing was what is ‘seen’ and ‘measured’, for example, in classes like an architectural drawing course I took in my undergrad, in art class in high school learning to draw still life, and in Trees and Shrubs, drawing plants for their botanical accuracy.

Way back before all these experiences, I would say I drew more on what is ‘felt’. I experienced the world through cartoons, sketchy hand drawings, and drew from feeling.

This course for me was the process of unlearning the emphasis on seeing visually to expose the complexity behind our other four senses.

Around the blindfold excercise, it all clicked and I loosened up my hand, drawing what is felt again. I started to enjoy the drawings I was producing and let go of the control I was inflicting on the pen.

For this field, I will take the messages I learned in this course and apply them to the way I approach design and ‘reading’ a landscape. It’s simple but I plan to sketch first, not be caught up in a final ‘look’, and use drawing as a tool for communicating my design quickly and efficiently.

The landscape lives within us, through our senses and ability to perceive. For me, I see this as a means to support my belief that we are not seperate from nature, that nature is within us and is us. I am thankful to have learned from Daniel and his approach as well as my classmates and look forward to continue to draw from the five senses.

Course summary – brainstorming

 

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A 8 – Windplay

Tuning In

I sat in Tea Swamp Park, which has a beautiful mature arbor of multiple kinds of persistent winter fruit. There are a lot of song birds that flit between the trees and the community garden, however, this site is wedged between two different construction sites and the busy traffic along 16th avenue.

I tried to draw the sounds using linework to express each instance of the chop saw, each blaring of the security alarm. the echo of the hammer and the doppler effect of the traffic beyond.

Wind Play

Across the street from Teaswamp Park, there is a building going up that has been pumping ground water out of the site continuously for six months (really). When they pulled down the church that stood across the street, the construction exposed the old piles that the original houses before the church used as foundations because this was a peat bog.

Peat bogs are particular ecologies that have a specific hydrological requirement. They both shed a lot of water and received a lot of water.

I thought a kind of aeolian pan flute might be a nice addition to the noise at Teaswamp Park. This initial sketch was exploring the relationships between the pipe depth, water levels and resonating lengths of the aeolian flute.  These would be long brass tubes installed to the same depth across three typical heights of the topography of the park. When the wind is blowing and there is no birdsong to mix with the anthropogenic noise of construction and traffic, then there would be these tubes, vibrating as the wind cuts across them, in harmony with each other, and the note would be set by the level of the groundwater, celebrating the undergrounded hydrological history of the site. 

 

 

This was my initial thought when sitting in the park.

 

Then I went home and thought about the beautiful canopy of the arbor that I drew in assignment 1. People sit under this arbour all summer long, where it is a good 10 degrees cooler than the open field.

Using trace, thread and scissors, to keep the profiles as simple as possible, i thought about two simple moves to create a spinner to hanging in the canopy of the arbor, as a marker of the airflow boundaries that keep the cool air under the canopy

 

 

 

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A 7 – Movement

Skateboard as Sensory Device

 

The Site

 

This is an alley I love to skate for it’s fun mixture of textures and heaved surfaces. I particularly like hitting the metal cover to the buried electrical. It feels like electricity.

 

The Media

I am riding independent trucks (stiff, wide axil, not loose and squirrely) on spitfire 99a wheels (hard, not gummy). My skate shoes were Globe, reasonably cushy.

When you skateboard, you see the terrain under your feet. It lives in my mind like a glowing trail. I wanted to try giving the things that I see with my feet form and colour.

 

 

The Textures

 

 

The Result (scroll down for a ride)

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A9- Smell notes

In class

Walking through Stanley Park, the potent smell of rainforest- of living, dead and the in between was immediately apparent. Sensorially, I have come to associate colour with smell and olfactory experience and this is demonstrated below.

Standing at the shores of the waterfront, the biting cold drowned out majority of the typical seaside scents. My sensory experience was therefore more reliant on the visual and the auditory and consequently, on memorial associations.

Waterside video 1

Waterside video 2

 

At home

Walking down the steps of the Walter C. Koerner library to the underground levels, I am hit suddenly with the intense, overwhelming, and rank smell of decay.

Rats.

It smells like dead rats.

My memory is immediately cast back to a horrible time in my first home where the effective counter to a singular mouse invasion resulted in the intense, overwhelming, and rank smell of the dead rodent emanating from an old, unused storage closet.

Ew.

Unpleasant does not even capture the essence of the stench. It is loud and towering. It engulfs the entire staircase in a stifling hug; everywhere at once, such that one cannot tell its source; the concrete walls? The staircase? The ceiling?

Forest-green, grey-black and piss-yellow- my brain visualizes the scent, painting an image of disgust- of rotting. A putrid fragrance. There are no top notes, no mid notes, no base notes. The smell is all-encompassing and circular: a lingering bitterness, a sickly sweetness, methane, sulfur dioxide.

I close my mouth firmly; a precaution so I do not taste the smell in all its overwhelming glory.

That animal- whatever it is, is at least a week dead. The urge to descend speedily in order to escape this cloud is stronger than ever. I walk faster, finally arriving in the old basement and sliding myself in between the bookshelves. The air is not fresh, but at least the scent of death is gone.

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Assignment 8 – Madison Drapkin

Tuning in:

Wind Play:

Motion/sound video: LINK

Tuning in was taken at the beach, and while listening to the peaceful lapping of the waves on the shore I began to observe the materials around me. I decided to collect a few to test the sounds they make when they collide with each other. Ultimately, I enjoyed the blunt sound that comes from the muscle shells and decided to develop a sort of windchime around it. Rocks were collected to weigh the sculpture down so that absolute stillness can be achieved when there is no wind pressure while also allowing for subtle movement allowing for the shells to collide and make noise in the wind.

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