Hey! Rebecca here.
So I've been keeping track of the project but not on the blog so here are my pseudo-posts all in one go. So, we started in one place and ended somewhere very different. All along we knew we wanted to combine sculpture and printmaking. That and the concept of body and landscape were the only survivors of the ideation process and subsequent edits.
This project was an exercise (at least for me) in problem solving as there were problems with our process at most points along the way. The original concept of suspending the figure over(or under) the landscape got axed a couple weeks into work. After looking at the processes we were considering and the amount of time and money it could take the decision was made to merge the figure into the landscape but still maintain a support structure so it could "hold" the body of the viewer. That also went the way of the dinosaur as did much of the research we had done to this point).
Next we discussed lights and lighting the forms from inside. This meant little to no interior structure. So we devised a method the cast prints onto forms to make a stiff "skin" that would ultimately be what was placed in the cube. I'm not sure we realized just how much work we had made for ourselves even after pairing the idea down to this point.
The first attempt to cast onto our forms failed when the polyurethane didn't want to stick to itself. So then onto watered glue. Not bad, but it dried slow and at first wouldn't release. After much trial and error the correct balance of release agent (vasilene) and drying time (if allowed to dry fully on the form it could not be removed in one piece, if removed too soon it fell apart).
So at that point, mass production all the way up install.