For this final project, I encountered many more difficulties than the other projects. At first I wasn’t at all sure what I wanted to do. One night, the idea came to me, but at that stage, it was still in 2-D form. I thought of the concept of a rib cage and how it resembled a birdcage, or a cage. I wanted to put little black birds inside. I wanted to paint this, using acrylics on a large canvas at first, so I began with concept drawings. As I struggled to make this idea more lifelike, I struggled with how to make the creepiness stand out, and the message really come forward.
I eventually decided to make this idea into a sculpture, and I briefly thought about making it out of clay or plaster. My whole idea was that bones are not a cage, and the odd relationship between birds and a rib cage. In order to carry this idea out, I wanted to use real bones.
My friend had mentioned that he found a dead deer on the side of the road, and my friend and I went investigating. We found a mass of bones, fur and yes, dried flesh. The first set of bones I cleaned got moved or thrown away by maintenance, in which instance, I am partly to blame. I did, however, find two more sets of bones more scarcely scattered, and managed to find enough ribs for my project.
The goal of my project was not to create a bird cage out of ribs. I want the ribs to still be a rib cage, and the birds are inside, which makes the ribs resemble a bird cage. I do not want it to become one, which I think makes the art object creepier. I wanted to keep the skeleton look, so I strung it as closely as possible to the way skeletons are strung up. The birds I made to look like scrappy birds, not clean or friendly, but almost like scavengers. I played off of the juxtapositions that Magritte presented, and in the end I am quite pleased with my rib cage and birds