PYRAMID HILL
Fabrication
Pyramid Hill is a sculpture park in Hamilton, Ohio. This park is compose of over 70 sculptures with over 50,000 visitors annually. Miami University ETBD's installation was apart of Pyramid Hill's Holiday Lights Show. ETBD had installations at Passage, Age of Stone, and Flower CDs.
As fabrication lead, I led the creative direction and assemblage of the Flower CDs, spending long nights in the studio with my peers. I also created content for the Age of Stone installation.
PROCESS:
DANDELION FOREST
As fabrication lead, I led the creation of the Dandelion Forest installation. Our goal for the Dandelion Forest was to create a sculpture composed of disks mounted onto PVC pipe that hang over the audience and reflect rainbow patterns onto the ground below. My team and I worked for weeks to test different materials based on how they could last in the winter weather, adhere to PVC, and how they reflected light. These included cellophane, holographic paper, vinyl, Mylar, prismatic sheeting, diffusers, and acrylic pieces.
Our team landed on using CDs arranged in a radial pattern mounted onto corrugated plastic using epoxy. We sourced these CDs from a local recycling center. The CDs created vivid refractions onto the ground when a focused light shone on them. From there, we had to figure out how to manipulate the disks to create the installation.
We melted, scored, snapped, sanded, and epoxied hundreds of discs and assembled them to see how they would hang and react to light. The final product of this installation was 5 flower disks, each composed of over 100 CDs measuring over 3 feet wide. These flowers were suspeneded in trees using wire.
OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS
Outside of my work as Fabrication Lead, I also contributed significantly to the concepting phase of our installation. Together, our class came up with 90 concepts that were presented to the staff at Pyramid Hill. From these, the staff selected a group of ideas for further development, and we then worked through the logistics and technical considerations required to bring those installations to life. A large part of our work at Pyramid Hill was working with a budget provided by Pyramid Hill.
I also created animations that were projected onto the rocks at the sculpture, Age of Stone. Our client wanted us to create content that followed a celestial theme. These animations were created in alignment with cues developed by our Experience Design Lead and were synchronized with programmed lighting effects from LED strips installed throughout the field leading up to the sculpture. This required close attention to timing, cohesion, and the integration of multiple visual elements to create a unified experience.
