So our third project was to make a door knocker. I've been doing a lot of work out at C&R Kutt Bottle, which is a non-profit glass recycling organization. It's basically the only way Nacogdoches has to recycle glass bottles. They are comprised of a very small group of people, originally branched from a church project, that collect wine bottles and use them to make all sorts of things like sets of drinking glasses, wind chimes, tea lights, christmas ornaments, lamps, everything! It's so cool. They sandblast designs on them, and they decorate things by gluing on tumbled bits of broken bottles. Their mission is to use every bit of the bottle, so we're working on uses for corks and bottle tops, and they tumble any broken bottles to make various sizes of glass bits that are no longer sharp. All the money they raise goes straight to Habitat for Humanity. They've been doing this for 2 years and have raised over $6,000 for Nac. Habitat so far. Last year Habitat was able to build 2 houses instead of one, due largely to this organization. So we've been going out there a lot to help make this stuff, and I wanted to find a way to incorporate glass into a metal piece.
When the doorknocker project was first introduced to us, we had been talking about abuse a lot because there had been some kind of abuse seminar in the student center. They made contact with my professor to talk about future ideas for collaboration between metals and this seminar. So anyway, we had been talking about tieing it into our art for a few weeks, so I decided to make abuse the focus of my doorknocker (since I had no ideas at all). I wanted to make it a door knocker that keeps you from knocking, like a person recovering from an abusive situation might not let future people in so easily. So there are magnets in all the forms that repel each other. Unfortunately I did not think about having to stabilize the knocker, so it just flips around and hits the form anyway. I'm working on stabilizing it with some tubing.
So the knocker (that I realize looks like an avacado) slides along the track so the knocker can choose which form to knock on.
The forms represent the stages of recovery, from very messy to almost whole. The designs are sandblasted onto large tumbled-glass pieces. The glass is held down by the copper circles, which are laid onto wool fabric yo-yos. I chose yo-yos because a lot of quilts used to be made with them, so to me it's a shape that represents comfort and family. Plus it's pretty.
I patinated the copper with heat to go along with this idea of gradual transitions, so the forms change color from a goldish to a deep orange. The whole thing is mounted on an old kitchen cabinet door. I need to age the door a little more, but I think it works well with the idea. Plus the hinges at the top make it very easy to mount.
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