Today I started thinking about what the invisible sculpture will actually look like. My first rough thought to get my design process going, is to make a box in the shape of a silhouette in 2D. However, I immediately realize I’ll be moving towards a 3d sculpture.

In researching, I am inspired by the artist, Jin Young Yu, who does a lot of work with clear sculpture. I’m also excited by the concept of plastic wrap graffiti. Plastic wrap could be a good medium to use for the see-through part of the sculpture. Plastic wrap is cheap and abundant. I need to make a frame for the plastic wrap, though, so I started to explore making a frame out of plywood. I laser cut various shapes and started experimenting with body shapes. First I made a cone-like body shape just by hand, thinking it would look like a dress once I put the plastic wrap on it, but then I realized that it just looked like a cone, and not a dress at all.

For my next prototype I moved in the opposite direction, and made the frame from a scan of a manikin I found on Autodesk. I downloaded the scan and sliced it at certain intervals, then laser-cut those intervals to fit together like a statue. This frame turned out to be way too sexy. It was better in the sense that it looked like a human, but it was a very different vibe than what I was originally going for.

Moving forward, I want the statue to be bottle-shaped, so that it has shoulders and hips, but in a subtle way. I think it will be more beautiful this way, and more able to receive notes. I also want the frame to be much more minimal. My plan is layered plywood to define the shoulders, the neck, and the head. The head is going to be intricately laser cut out of layers of plywood.

As the invisibility sculpture turns more abstract, I’m thinking it would be nice if you actually put your thought donations into the heart of the sculpture. I am going to make the heart opening very beautiful with intricately cut acrylic on the laser cutter.