P r o j e c t    3
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If there's one thing I've taken away from Joey and Sandy and my ACTLab experience, it's that whatever I create should be representative of me.  As a chemical engineer I initially felt very out of place in the ACTLab.  I thought the class was full of a lot of artsy RTF majors and I couldn't relate.  But Sandy really tries to diversify the class, and there are students from every part of the academic, political, and philosophical spectrum.  I became more and more comfortable in the class as I realized that I was there to share my unique perspective, and to be an audience for others as they share theirs.     Keeping this in mind, for my third project I decided to focus on a symbol that has great meaning to me: the phoenix.  Early in the school year I was hospitalized due to a blood clot, and I've spent the greater portion of my non-academic time slowly recovering.  I find the phoenix a great metaphor for myself and my experiences, so I wanted to share that with the class.     I wanted to work with a medium I had never worked with before, and I needed something that was readily available and didn't require a lot of tools to work with.  Aluminum appealed to me, and I started collecting lots of soda cans.  I got some aluminum modeling wire to act as a frame, and a bottle of super glue to affix everything.     The first step was to cut out the aluminum into "feathers".  I'd cut the cans with some shears, taking off the tops and bottoms until I was left with sheets of aluminum.  Then, I'd cut the sheets into strips, and cut those strips into tapered "feather" shapes of varying lengths.     I found those feathers a little aesthetically disappointing, so I experimented with some texturing techniques.  I decided on a sort of ripple effect like corrugated cardboard because I felt it made the feathers a little more interesting to look at, and reflected the light in some intersting ways.  I accomplished this effect by pounding a pin on top of the sheet aluminum feathers until they bent.  Then I'd flip the feathers over and repeat the process alternating between the bends on the other side.     After I had an assortment of feathers, I started adding to the frame, supergluing one feather at a time, beginning with the longest feathers attached to the frame.     I kept adding one feather after another until it looked the way I wanted it to.  I built up the body first, then the wings, and the head last.     The final phoenix has its head arched towards the sky and its wings outspread as if just starting its flight.
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