Emily Pheifer

How can I use the concepts of deconstructed nonobjective fragmentation to create awareness for endangered plants? This is the question that I chose to focus on for the duration of my time in AP Studio. Yet in the beginning, when my teacher had announced it was time to build a question surrounding our media I was stuck. For a long time, I was under a lot of pressure to put out media that was perfectly built and executed, and immediately I was stuck. If I chose the wrong theme, would I grow tired of the class? If I chose something too difficult, would I fail? One day while I was throwing various shapes, I thought of other areas in my life that I was passionate in. How could I invoke my other passions of storytelling, the difficulty of perfectionism and nature all into one simple, determining sentence? Then I thought of one of Pixar’s recent animated movies Inside Out. I thought that the movie was flawed but had amazing storytelling and humor in some areas. Then I pondered on one scene where Joy, Sadness, and Bing-Bong go through the Abstract Thought machine and they face errors of bad amination that Pixar had included as critique, one of them being nonobjective fragmentation. Then I questioned, what if I could enforce that into what I have been doing through making ceramic, geometric forms to invoke a different message. I wanted it to look childish yet say something more than what it showed, something to make people start a conversation about what my pieces are actively saying. Yet I could initiate that feeling not through animated characters, but through endangered plants and how they are deconstructing into nothing and something we will never get back.

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