Some more experimental 3D pieces that show my attempt to portray the movement of unified ants working together.

Looking from a knew perspective

I took the negative image of the climbing ants and tried imagine the spaces btween the ants as the solid blocks of colour and discard the outline of the actual ants. I stitched these solid blocks into a canvas. I thought the result was quite nice but it was a labourous task as I had to fill in the solids by stitching one stitch at at a time. If any white was showing throught the affect would be ruined so it took a while to fill it all in.

After stitching the piece I found that the back of thhe canvas was also interesting looking. The solid black areas are like loads of tiny black ants crowded together perhaps feeding on a sticky swwet patchs left behind after food. When so many ants are so close to gether you can't distinguish where one ant starts and another finishs, instead they appear to be a moving black blotch.

The loos black strands of thread resemble the lines of ants going from one food source to another.

Experimenting with sculpture

This 3D was to represent the ants using their bodies to climb and become something bigger than themselves. It's based on the negative space drawing of the ants building a bridge to get from one leaf to another distant one. I used nails and glue to make this.

2D to 3D

I found that the lettering concept that I displayed in 2D to be quite interesting and began wondering how I could display this idea in a 3D piece, I made lots of letters and words by bending and twisting wire and documented them in the different arrangements that I thought captured the concept well. I used words like ants, work,and busy. I noticed that the shadows casted by these wire words gave an interesting effect. They gave me the feeling of the words moving and there being more of them than there actually were.

antics :)

I used ink and wooden cut letter blocks to print this image .

a.n.t.. Ant.

While playing with the idea that one lone ant is insignificant and quite pointless , but yet when these lone ants come together they can be a powerful and interesting thing i made the connection of how letters share this aspect.  How a letter when on its own is meaningless but when put together with many can be very meaningful .

 I did some drawings while attempting to show this similary between isolated ants and letters. I used the word "ant" to represent the actual body of the ants and wrote it repeatedly on the page in the manner a colony of ants would operate.

I decided to cut relevant words out of a newspaper as those words were meant to be part of a bigger picture. I then arranged the words on a page to convey the same concept of the insignificance of a lone ant or letter. The words appear to be organised and in sync with the pattern they are creating, however some of the words have been cut into separated letters,  these have gotten scattered in a a seemingly more random pattern. 

They're fun. just depends on where you put them.

My ants settled in nicely and stared digging on day two. They must have figured out there was no gettin out of the ant farm and so they never dug again..  from day 5 to day today (day 27) theres been zero tunnel digging, they just hang about and try to escape through the air holes.

 

 And do I gave them more challenging tasks to keep them and myself busy.
 Took this ant a while to find the sugar in the centre but he got there none the less :). Unfortuantely he celebrated by dying a short while later.. I decided no more ants in the labyrinth