Concrete Planks

Their seems to be today a lot of mimicry in building materials. A lot of building material designers for example are trying to mimic the look of wood siding in vinyl to make a material like vinyl which has a long life span look as beautiful as real wood siding. This kind of example has been seen all over the building and product design fields. For this piece I looked at a material that is commonly left out of this discussion and worked to see how to achieve this effect with material by mimicing the traits of a material that is considered to be more beautiful. Using simple casting techniques I casted 3 separate pours of concrete over an old railroad tie. This process yielded similar results but the properties of concrete created slight variation which can only be observed when set beside other pieces casted from the same mold.

Blocks

The materials and textures around us seem to be always overlooked by people. These materials and textures are beautiful in their own right but are commonly painted over and hidden behind a mask of a designers choice. The purpose of this piece is to highlight the natural beauty of the wood, especially the wood's grain. The sculpture was created by laminating several planks of oak together switching what is considered top and bottom to create a piece from the woods natural end grain.