Adam's Bow

From being lofty vibrant cushions to minute detailed balls of air, inflatables rarely fail to capture a person's attention. Since the 1800s, these balloon constructions have amazed many with the ways plastic, air, and an artists' mind can bring about such "technology, scale, and creative complexity"(Exploratorium, Inflatable).

With my dear friends Evelyn and Marissa and their innovative ideas, skillful hands, and intentions to bless our Westmont College community, I was able to redesign the originally six-colored rainbow into an abstractly shaped tri-colored rainbow.

Adam's Bow: our tri-colored rainbow installed at Adam's Hall

The Process

Evelyn, Marissa, and I had to do a lot of thinking through how we could best design, cut, and paste the rainbow together and onto one large fan. We were limited to a few colors of plastic paper, so we took that as an opportunity to use only three colors- teal, magenta, and white- and still make a bold, cheerful statement of a rainbow. We rolled out over twenty feet(!) of plastic paper for each color and ironed them with some paper in between the iron and the plastic so that the plastic wouldn't melt into the iron. Then, when we reached 2/3 of the way, we cut abstract designs along the middle of the plastic paper to create two segments of each tube. The lengthiness of the rainbow resulted in a long ironing process. Lastly, we attached with tape the three long tubes unto a cloud which we connected to the huge fan. Other clouds were attached to openings we found along the colored tubes.

Installation

As Kurt Perschke in His "Red Ball Project" uses already existing spaces and architectures to place his inflatable, we also were able to utilize the structure of the Adam's Hall and the Art Museum to install our buoyant rainbow. Placing the fan on the second floor of the art museum, we let the rainbow tubes fall down unto the first floor of Adam's Hall, near the stairs where students regularly walk on their way to classes (hence the name "Adam's Bow.") It was like adding a joyful ornament on the art building, giving the people who walk by a shout of thought-provoking and gladdening display.

Overall, this was a stretching art project as I learned to appreciate the different strengths people bring to a group escapade whether it is the ability to think with 3-D visuals or the gift of being able to energize and help in a variety of ways. It is also amazing that we had the chance to proclaim and share joy to others with simply some plastic, air, and creativity!