What is “Arterial Sea?”
“Arterial Sea” was designed to engage participants in creating a beautiful shared artwork with a fun twist. “Arterial Sea” combines drawing and crafting with performance and play.
Participants were invited to choose from 11 sea creature templates: barracouta, flounder, jellyfish, kahawai, kingfish, mahimahi, snapper, squid, stingray, tuna, and turtle. Then participants made their sea creature by: 1) drawing and colouring in the detail on the template; 2) cutting, folding and taping to make a 3d model with a tab on the back. Participants were aided by reference photos, instructions, and helpful volunteers.
Next is the fun twist: to get the model into place participants stood at the back of the scene (a large undersea mural) and moved their creature through one of the channels. This aspect of the event helped show off their sea creature to other participants and observers in a fun and quirky way.
“Arterial Sea” at Waitati Music Festival, 2022
Arterial Sea was a community art event at the 10th Annual Waitati Music Festival held at Bland Park, Waitati on the 5th November, 2022.
Over 7 hours we made a total of 92 sea creatures: 1 Kahawai, 2 kingfish, 2 barracouta, 4 snapper, 5 flounder, 5 mahimahi, 6 tuna, 9 stingray, 16 squid, 18 jellyfish and 24 turtles! Participants of all ages enjoyed this activity. Check out some photos and videos from the event below.
The video below shows some of the sea creatures moving through the scene at 8x speed.
Here is the same video at 1x speed with sound.
My perspective on "Arterial Sea”
I thought this project was particularly strong in these areas:
Fun and approachable activity
Encourages participation and creative exploration
Connecting people to the wildlife around them
Community creating art together
Evolution of a piece over time
Play and performance
There were two stand-out features of this event:
The simplicity and effectiveness of the sea creature models. They were pretty easy to make and looked much better than flat paper models. I think this made the activity much more compelling.
The performance/play aspect. Participants moving their creature through the scene was a fun and playful twist. Participants and observers enjoyed this aspect a lot.
Developing and building “Arterial Sea”
I arrived at the idea of making sea creatures with tabs in the back to move through an underwater scene. I made some prototypes until I was happy with the overall design and feel of the sea creatures. Then I made a prototype of the background scene. I was happy with the scene prototype so I went ahead and started working on the large model. I did have issues with the large jigsawed plywood scene holding together, so I ended up using more mending plates than I expected. Lastly I designed and painted the scene and made all the other paper sea creature templates. Here are some photos showing the design and construction process.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the awesome volunteers who helped me out on the day: Kate, Sophie, Anna, and Emma. Big thanks to the entire Waitati Music Festival crew for putting on such a great event. Thanks Alex and Leila for helping me move the project around while I worked on it. Thanks to Georgia for being a great painting buddy and product tester.