Final Project

            For my final project, my idea was to make a landscape out of food, but natural food, like vegetables fruits, roots, and nuts, because they come from the landscape. I wanted to create a traditional looking landscape and use different foods to make it look as realistic as possible. I also tried to use the fact that food goes bad in some way, so as vegetables or fruits decompose, they change color, and it would be somewhat reminiscent of the changing of the seasons in the landscape. I wanted to incorporate the idea of time, which we discussed in class, into my project, by using foods with a short shelf life, foods that decompose. Before hand, I thought it would work well because many of the vegetables, fruits, etc. resemble something in nature. I thought about what I could use to create the different textures and colors that one finds in nature. Potato skin resembles bark, there are plenty of leafy greens to resemble to leaves of a tree, more potato skins for boulders, cornhusk for grass, and berries to paint flowers. I also tried to think about what to use as adhesive and decided on marshmallow fluff. I knew that it would be tricky because vegetables do go bad and so I didn’t want to start it until the day of our exam so that it would be fresh.

            I faced many challenges when trying to construct my piece. Adhesive didn’t take well to the vegetables because of their texture. I ended up using rubber cement but it still didn’t work very well. I also found that time was a big issue. I wasn’t able to give the image all of the depth that I wanted and incorporate all of the different textures. I ended up letting go of a lot of ideas. I mostly used potatoes, brown ones for the tree and green ones for the grassy hills. I used white onion for the sky but didn’t have enough to complete the sky. I used artichoke for the leaves of the tree. I had also planned to make a dirt path out of sunflower seeds, a field wildflowers in the distance made out of berries, red onion, lemon, and carrot, and a horizon line of dark forest. I had also ripped cornhusk into strips and cut it up to make grass but was unable to use it all. I still had cardboard showing when I was done, though I didn’t want it to. If I had more time, I would have tried to alter my idea a bit and work in 3D rather than try to make a 2 dimensional landscape. I would have tried to incorporate more foods to show more variety of texture that is found in nature. I would have put more leaves on the tree to make it seem more realistic. With this project, I learned that food is an extremely difficult medium to work with because there are so many limitations with keeping it fresh, its shelf life, and so on.