Mary Effler: Slots

I've always enjoyed studying world religions, and seeing how the beliefs of all these systems differ while still having so many of the same core tenants. I also really like studying how they interact, and I wanted to express that in project form.
I had the idea of combining all the slot shapes into the form of an umbrella, as that's sort of how I see a lot of people as viewing religion - a tool that helps protect them from the bad of the world and provide them safety and security. So I quickly drew up some ideas in my sketchbook, and chose some of the major religious symbols to use:

 

The handle of the umbrella is made up of peace symbols, as I believe that to be the true core of religions all over the world - the search for peace. The rectangles that serve to hold those pieces together have various words for peace engraved into them in many languages. I eventually chose not to use the unitarian symbol, and kept the paganism and atheism symbols from having wedges, for structural integrity, and because there are already enough holes in their design, it should be easy to connect those pieces to others without the wedges.

I then got a friend to take me to Hobby Lobby, and chose to use mat board for this project. Part of it was a price concern, but also the mat board seemed less likely to fray easily at the edges as foam board. Also, if I wanted to paint it later, it would take paint pretty easily. 

I then set about to putting them into Illustrator (I have it installed at home and have way more experience there than in Rhino). I looked up some advice on Google, and found a site with advice for acrylic interlocking work (http://support.ponoko.com/entries/498833-How-to-make-interlocking-acrylic-designs). From there, it had the interesting idea of adding little rounded bits to the wedges for the slots, so help add structural support and keep them from fraying. Since I'm still using a material that is at least somewhat prone to it, I thought those would be a good idea to add.

To make the shapes, I essentially just used a circle as the base for most of them, but I did want a couple of the shapes to be non-circular, to give more choices for putting them together later. Most of the symbols have small pieces that will be cut out and can be used in models later, but I chose not to give them slots. The idea for this is from a philosophical idea I have in regards to religion - Most people tend to gloss over the small, inner details of religions, including their own, when really, it's these small pieces together that make up the core of a faith, and I think those should be shown more openly. So instead, I chose to include many slots along the outer edges of the main pieces, so that they can not only connect to each other, but have plenty of extra openings to add these small pieces, so that they are more on the outside. It also plays with the idea that the smaller blocks can be shared across religions, and attached to different religious symbols. If I were to paint this project later, I might paint each religious symbol and it's pieces their own colour, so that when they get swapped between faiths, it's easier to see where some similarities are between the faith. It's an idea, at least.

So when I was done, I had these slots:

If you look carefully, you can see the small circular nodes on the slot wedges.

 

And here's the full thing laid out. My mat board is only 32"x40", so the canvas is sized for that. (Edit: This has since been changed to 24"x40" to fit the cutters dimensions).

The pieces all cut out look like this:  

And here's some of the workflow in piecing them together. I had some locktite glue for a while, but then I ran out and had to switch to some normal superglue. The process worked pretty well though, constructing the two different pieces for putting them together later. I would work some on the umbrella bit, put that aside for the locktite to set, then work a bit on the handle portion while that Loctite was setting, and just keep switching back and forth. 

 As I was putting it together though, it resembled less and less of an umbrella, and looked more like a tree to me. The part I originally intended to be the handle was now the trunk, and the other pieces formed the leaves. There's plenty of tree imagery in tons of world religions though (tree of life, tree of the knowledge of good and evil, naturalism, etc), so I thought it would make an interesting take on the idea of the Tree of Life:

I'm also still a fan of Ed calling it the Peace Cannon

Eventually, I plan to take spray paint and paint it the approriate colours. I wound up using the smaller cutouts from some of the pieces to act as "fruit" hanging off the tree branches. All in all, I'm fond of how this turned out, but it would need a stand to be upright. Also, since I used matboard, it's not very good at standing up. I'd use a thin plywood or something if I'd gone with a tree idea from the beginning.