It’s the precious maple time
I was helping my student finishing with his architecture design project at the same time this week, and the concept of his idea was to create this space for people to chill and have a calming meditation moment with the tea ceremony. It was quite satisfying in the dialogue while we were discussing the spiritual values of his design. He has merged many natural elements into his creation, for example, he has a cherry tree in the reading corner and having a waterfall system by collecting rains from the roof. Discussing with others always occurs with some interesting ideas rather than thinking by myself. This gives me an insight into using natural materials and try other ways to look at them.
I started to grab some fallen leaves home and dries them in books. I actually repeating the same procedure every year when autumn arrives, and those maple leaves are a gift from the earth, there are so many ways to explore with it. 5 years ago, I was painting the galaxy on it, but now, the way how I think has changed. In the past, I was trying to customize the leaves and get them ‘live’ as long as possible. Now, I shifted to the leaves itself rather than the extra values I added to it, so how I treat those leaves becomes different.
I was trying to reprint the patterns on the leaves, but the outcome doesn’t come so clear as I expected, so I moved on to the spatial communication light could transform.
At the time, I want to explore how other materials shows with the light. First, I dried the tree skin, and peeled it in slices. It was hard to peel dry tree skin because the skin gets curvy and fragile to touch.
By holding the new form of the skin, the shadow and the physical objects represent different ways of knowing. In the physical world, tree skin is a natural material, however, it’s shadow looks like the epitome of the city. Who knows how many human activities this tree has witnessed through time.
With the leaves I was creating this surrounding feel, not only observing how the ligh shows on the patterns of the leave, but also seeing the shape it projects.
The way how it shows doesn’t limit how we think beyond that.