My first intention in designing this work was to create a piece of furniture that could also stand alone as art: a functional sculpture. Intended to be the first in a series of furniture pieces I endeavored to create over the course of a semester under the professorship of Thomas Müller, I chose to begin with what I had expected to be a fairly straightforward and simple construction project: shelving. This, however, turned into the most complicated and time-consuming project I had ever attempted. After pages of conceptual drawings and several class lectures missed as notes were replaced by sketches of shelves, I finally produced the blueprints for what was to become Polydromic Composition 14.
As soon as the plans had been put to paper, I began construction. With the help of a power jigsaw, rulers, clamps, Spoon, and Gorillaz, two 4’ by 8’ boards slowly developed into 14 stair-stepped pieces. From there, it was only a matter of assembling the structure. Finally, after three months and many long nights in LMU’s sculpture studio, Polydromic Composition 14 was finished.
A free-standing corner piece, the cloud shelf seamlessly blends an overall organic form with the pixel-esq stairsteps of the 14 individual pieces. The sum of the exaggeratedly mechanical parts equals an organic whole.
