Project #2 Arrange & Rearrange

When visiting the museum of natural history (see previous post) I took notice of the different arrangements of objects. The way the objects were arranged made them easier to view and navigate around the museum.

I saw the impact different arrangements had on the objects when researching artists who work with collections.

Now it was my turn to investigate for myself…

Primary Research

Task 1: Arrange & Rearrange

Having my objects collected, I then had the job of photographing them in several arrangements.

Twigs

arrangement: random, chaotic, jumbled
arrangement: divided by shape type. 1) straight 2) forked 3) curved.
arrangement: tall to short
arrangement: circular & in size order

Leaves

arrangement: random
arrangement: by colour and evenly spaced into a grid formation.
arrangement: artistically, centered around the largest leaf at the bottom, centre. Stems pointing towards this central leaf. Greenest leaves around the outside.

Feathers

arrangement: random
arrangement: divided by neat (bottom) and messy-shaped leaves (top) Divided by a central gap.
arrangement: light to dark, horizontally placed.
arrangement: grouped into smaller piles. categorised by colour (light, mid and dark).

Task 2: Re-direct the attentional focus

I then took separate photos of the individual objects from a group. I needed to select an interesting aspect of the object to focus on. For example, with the twigs (below), I picked out the following elements:

  • dark and light contrast, split at centre
  • fork in the twig and it is long and thin
  • an oval ‘mouth’
  • lichen growth
  • scratched markings on the surface
  • fluffy catkins
  • round markings
  • fork in the twig, colour is slightly green
  • kinks/ knuckles create an interesting twisty shape
  • smooth surface, rusty red colour

I then needed to create a grid with these photos. In the example below, I made sure to connect the lines from one photo to the next, so that the images would meld together visually.

Leaves

I was more drawn to the leaves when selecting a topic to explore further. I then produced 2 grids using some of the same leaf images, and switching others.

Placing the stems in a direction that guides the eye around the grid. I used negative space to break up the composition and kept this space to the bottom right area.
Placing the greener elements to the right and left, with the rusty colours in the centre.

I found this task more challenging than I was expecting. Because all the leaves are quite different, I wasn’t sure how to place them harmoniously.

How I made the grid in adobe photoshop:

  1. place embedded
  2. resize the image, accept (tick)
  3. rectangular marquee tool
  4. select the square
  5. mask
  6. unlink the mask from the picture
  7. v for move tool
  8. w rows to move it around
  9. to resize, edit> transform> scale >accept (tick)

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