Seeing Damien Hirst’s cigarette cabinets come up on my social media feed is what inspired me to collect that data that I did. Its an interesting concept that through self indulgence humans are able to slowly kill themselves. His piece ‘The Abyss’ which is a stainless steel cabinet with the butts in it highlights the cold and deathly nature of such a habit in contrast to the way that a human simply satisfies a craving. Hirst says that smoking is “like a very diluted way of facing death, constantly.” Additionally when looking through undergraduate courses on the Graphic Communication Design degree in student work I found this piece by Jiawei Yu called ’30-day library’. When I initially saw the piece I thought that the rows looked like loads of lighters, as if information concerning these had been recorded. This made me think of what other data I am able to represent through recording my smoking habit other than just the cigarettes.

To choose other data to record I considered my interest in illustration and how i was collecting data concerning death, which is clearly very personal to me. Therefore I decided to record characters in my dreams by drawing them the instant I woke up, what can be more personal than the characters made in your own mind.

Considering how my tutors gave me good feedback for my collage style work I used this as a staring point for my maquettes. Therefore when we had the 3D workshop I used clay as a way to create a collage of body pieces, taking the collage away from 2D. I chose to do it this way since when I visualised my smoking data I saw a big distorted monster, like how smoking affects the human body by mutilating it. And so by creating a lump of flesh with bits of body parts is what I decided to do and left it textured to give it a brutal roughness. If I did this again though I would have used a lot more clay and made a bigger sculpture and cast it to create a lightweight sculpture. I would’ve liked the end product to be large and made from a shiny red material as if it were red plastic.

To develop these sculptures and pay attention to how my tutors liked by collage, I used photoshop to produce a 2D version of this. I did not feel like the clay captured the disgusting lump that I wished to produce, therefore by finding pieces of humans that fit on sites with life models on them I created a piece with parts of humans. I added the meat, bones and teeth to give the piece a more skeletal feel. I would like to explore this further a create a much much larger piece in photoshop and also improve my photoshop skills since I have rarely used it before. I developed this piece when I was inspired by an illustration workshop and so I created two worksheets on this. The first contains my ideas, and the second is the product. The end piece was a poster where the ball of body pieces are heads of two men shaking hands with ‘Habitual’ written across it. This idea came from the normality of smoking, its as easy as shaking someone hand, the men represent the act of smoking and the lettering demonstrate the addiction. However it is a more carefree word, if you look at it as a ‘habit’ rather than and ‘addiction’ it belittles it in a way. This demonstrates the casual smoker’s attitude towards smoking, which I myself am guilty of.

In another workshop I created three more maquettes concerning this data. The first consisting of chicken wire and melted plastic. The way that the black plastic melts into the chicken wire provides in my opinion this grotesque black lump that looks like tar. While the clear and green plastic is melted together, where the green penetrates the purity of the clear. Moreover the lumps of melted plastic and interwoven plastic give the piece a clogged feel like the plastic is parasitic. The second was an extension of this piece, black plastic melted into a ball covered with clear plastic. I don’t know what the best way to describe my thoughts on these bits of melted plastic other than ‘clogged’. Then my third piece is made from some old trousers and fabric, again the fabric is melted. I threaded red thread through the holes since I thought it looked like a vein. I used mundane items in these sculptures like trousers, bin bags and bubble wrap to demonstrate the normality of mundane nature of a smoking habit, since there are about 1.1 billion smokers in the world. To make these I made considerable use of the heat gun, my own lighter and the soldering iron. I thought these implements were the most applicable, the process of making these sculptures mirrors the way that smoking affects your body. It burn and destroys what is good and whole, leaving it broken and frail.

I created the wire sculptures of people as further representations of my data. I found that the wire was a perfect material for these two maquettes. It is easily manipulated, just like the addict, and it is grey and industrial, like the smoker becoming a slave to the industry, there is no sentiment just grey unfeeling need for profit. The first is like a line drawing and the second I find more interesting. I created shapes and linked them slowly together in order to create a person, when on the table and organised it takes the form of a person and when picked up is all goes together and loses its from. I found this quite interesting, I would like to make some life sized ones with heavier metal and properly joined together so they don’t fall apart. Having one hung up and one either on the floor arranged or attached on the wall so it does not flop would be interesting. I like the way that the sculptures have no identity, they are simply human and grey. Again demonstrating the aforementioned about the ambiguity of the individual.

I then decided to explore more mediums and manners that I am able to represent my data. I had a piece which I had made in a 3D workshop a few weeks before and it was perfect to create into one of my sculptures, by drawing on it in black marker it became a piece which you could view from different angles. I would like to create a bigger version and mount it on a wall possibly.

I also attempted to make some with paper and cardboard, they simply are ideas that briefly popped into my mind and I made them without thought into the deeper connection with my data, experimenting was the main idea for these.

The word encapsulated in the paper sculpture and the way that the cardboard pieces work together led me to make my last piece out of fabric. I used the same black plastic from earlier to create the skulls, the number of skulls is equivalent to the highest number of cigarettes I had in a day. They are encapsulated in the fabric which to me mimics a lung, clearly it cannot be inflated which shows the drab state of my own lungs. The staples are a careless manner of joining the fabric, just like the careless way I treat my body whilst smoking.