Cultural Walks

For one of our Visual Design briefs we have to create a problem with Leicester and fix it with a form of art.

It took me a while to think of an idea for this project but after creating a couple of mood boards I finally got an idea.

While walking through Leicester it’s quite easy to notice that it’s rather built up, dull and unless you go to certain areas it lacks a lot of greenery. This is when the thought occurred to me “Do people living in Leicester realise how beautiful the parks are around them?”
Right outside Leicester there is Bradgate Park and just walking through it is awe-inspiring. It’s such a different environment compared to the centre of Leicester so how wonderful would it be to put something based off Bradgate Park right in front of the Highcross.

So now I had my problem and part of my answer. I wanted to place something based off Bradgate Park in Leciester but what was that something.

I looked over old photos from my time wandering through the park to try and get an idea of what I could use. One idea could have been Old John but that wouldn’t create the more natural look I wanted. Then I noticed how amazing and downright beautiful some of the trees are in Bradgate. They’re all twisted and warped, hollow in places and weird. So now my mind was settled on creating some form of tree.
I now knew what I wanted to create, a tree of some form to place in the middle of Leicester but I didn’t just want to plant a tree. As a statement planting a tree would work but I wanted to get more creative.
I had an idea about using Willow shoots and weaving them to create a shape of a tree. We used to have a dome house in my primary school made of weaved willow and kids used to play in it all the time. It was very natural and it would also sprout leaves as well. Though I liked this idea I wanted to create something a little different, using man made materials.
I started to look through different sculptures to try and get an idea of what I could create; I wanted to create the essence of the trees, twisted, hollow. I wanted kids to be able to play around it and find it interesting to look at too. My mind drifted to one of the old Bradgate Park briefs where we had to create a wire sculpture. I then began to imagine it in a bigger scale. It would have the essence of a tree, kids would be able to climb through it and play around it. Though only problem then would be that it wouldn’t be very colourful at all.

My attention drew to the leaves and what could be done of the leaves. They couldn’t be real leaves since they’d die off pretty quickly. I then remembered that a lot of Leicester’s new look is based on lighting so perhaps some form of lighting could be used.

Lighting alone wouldn’t create a rather “leafy” look alone, in face the tree would just look like it has Christmas lights draped around it so something would have to be made to be placed around the lighting to make it look like leaves. I want it to be transparent and durable yet have some colour so as the lighting filters through it shine the colour of the material.

I then thought of some form of coloured plastic. Plastic’s quite durable, it comes in a variety of colours, it can be transparent and it can be fused quite well to metal. It could be attached to the top tree branches to either look like leaves or just large sheets bunched together to create a larger body of leaves.

Colour suddenly came in to place. My initial idea was green but then I thought again and thought autumnal colours would be prettier, there would be more variety of colour (gold through to red) and it would be more striking.
So I finally had my idea complete. It would be a tree made of wire with thin durable coloured plastic for leaves, then for a more striking effect at night lighting would be place on the branches.