Selby Botanical Gardens | Installation Boards
Student:
Livia Lenhoff
Project:
Abstracting Nature
Design III: Process, Form & Communication
Ringling College of Art & Design
About this Assignment:
Students are asked to define a journey from one key location to another within the Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota. We begin with a site visit for research and documentation. Students then create studies of natural and manmade forms that are unified by some 2D or 3D shape. These are then developed into a series of sequenced frames at three different aspect ratios.
The purpose of this assignment is: First, to use the natural world as inspiration and as a guide to formal harmonies in palette, shape and layout. Second, to be able to leverage unifying formal attributes within a design and play with the balance between variety and consistency. Finally, to be able to leverage abstraction. For example: simplified shapes create opportunities for transitions that go beyond simple camera moves, and they can help create visual connections between disparate objects. It also allows a designer to flexibly reconfigure modular elements across formats.
We begin with a lecture on abstractions of nature in art and design, looking at the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, AM Cassandre, Charlie Harper as well as contemporary practitioners like George Bokhua and the studio Buck.
