Documenting Place

When we started brainstorming for this project, we first had to come up with a place. We chose Gooseberry Falls because we had all been there and we knew the area very well. We thought a place that was a type of river would be great as a twelve-foot vertical work.
Dividing everything up turned out to be pretty simple, but everyone helped each other out in different areas. I did the photographing and collage work, while Nick worked on the typography, choosing the poem for the work, and coming up with the idea of replacing the water in the photos with type. Erik worked on the illustration but there wasn’t too much of it in our project. So he definitely made up for that by helping Nick and me tremendously with our jobs along with assembling the work itself.
We had started with a very complex idea of shower curtain strips waving in front of our collaged photos and type. This had turned out to not work because we couldn’t iron out the wrinkles in the curtains. We eventually simplified by cutting down the size of the width tremendously from 4 feet to 8 inches. This seemed to work better because the viewer could focus more on the type.
The unique part of our project is that the water was taken out of the photos and replaced with text that is flowing along a wavy path. It is then collaged down the work that is 8 inches by 12 feet, looking like a river of waterfalls.
Our work has a bit of surprise at the end with a silhouette of us three group members. It appears that three people are looking at this work and you can see their shadows by the sun.
Our craftsmanship is very unique and well executed with our seamless collage that runs the full 12 feet. We also spent a lot of time working on the waved edges, which we found out adds a lot of visual interest to the work.