My Work

This was perhaps the most confusing assignment to date. Design a note that represents me? What represents me? What facet of myself can I even represent? Notes are just dots on a strip of bars that make up the language of music. How can I take something as complicated and multi-dimensional as the entirety of “Me” and simplify it to a note?

I started small. What kind of note did I want to use to represent me? Thirteen years of piano lessons and I still I could barely remember what note was called what, but I could remember the names of quarter notes, half notes, and eighth notes. What would best represent me? I chose eighth notes, because they sound out the longest, and they would be the easiest accommodate, because they have no stem. They’re just a singular dot.

Okay, now what did I want to do with this eighth note? How does one represent sound? That’s easy: soundwaves. But how do I do that in a solid medium? So I took some dowel rods, drilled some holes, and voila we had a foam ball impaled on a rod, with three more rods sticking out. To represent sound waves I drilled some holes in the rods, put some wire through as anchors, and strung up some brightly colored string. There was the vague thought of the colors representing emotion (red for love/anger, yellow for fear/joy, blue for trust) but it didn’t quite jam with me. It felt more like I was representing how I prefer things to be simplistic.

What else did I want to represent? Well, I am a pretty prickly and irritable person sometimes, and I wouldn’t mind playing with that. So I cut up a lot of wire (so much wire) and did my best to stab the pieces into the foam ball without grievously injuring myself.  I still stabbed myself, though. Blood was drawn in the creation of this thing. I thought the base it rested on was a little plain, so I drilled in some tiny holes and made some music notes out of wire and stabbed those suckers in. It looked really neat, but how were people supposed to see it so far down on the ground?

Obviously, I made a plinth. It was honestly just a box, and kind of plain looking, so I decided to play with that, too. I drilled more holes on the inside to stab some notes in. Still a little plain. How about I put some wire spikes on the outside? I did that (it reminded me of some sort of instrument) and then wove strings in and around the spikes to make this complicated mess of yellow, blue, and red. Some longer strings I attached music notes to and hung them up and over the opposite side of the spikes. Looked pretty neat!

 The assignment was basically about vertical , whether it was flying, falling, or looking down from a great height or up at something Really Tall. So my first thought was of Leonardo da Vinci’s gliders. While exploring that particular idea, I thought about the Winged Victory statue and then of gargoyles. So, why not make a human form with glider wings as arms? And maybe some mothman influence as well.

 But during the making process my anxiety was going nuts. There were days when every single sound made me want to explode, or the cars driving behind me were enemies hunting me down or stalking me wherever I went. I didn’t feel safe anywhere, and I was so irritable and jacked up that my hands were shaking and I was constantly on the edge of angry-crying. I hated this piece because the foam wouldn’t cooperate. I hated using screws, I hated that the tape stuck to the table even though it’s just what tape does. I hated that I had to cut it to pieces to fit it around a spine of wood in order to give it structure. How could I give it structure when I myself was close to flying apart at the seams?

 So I used that feeling instead. I was feeling anxious and paranoid and irritable? Let’s channel that into the piece. Let’s cover this thing in eyes and make it as unnerving as possible. Let’s make this something out of an indie horror game. Let’s instill the feeling of DANGER DANGER RUN AWAY. And it worked! With the feedback I got from my classmates, I had succeeded in the feeling of being watched, of being judged, of the sheer paranoia I often have to push through in my daily life.