Bloom

Made in collaboration with Ian Bennett, Caitlyn Steele and Xiaoyi Peng

Our goal for the semester was to create a sculpture that represented sustainability across multiple campuses, to create a visual representation of how people participated in sustainable practices, and to show them how they can affect a physical object. Our school worked alongside four other schools; Ball State, Kent State, University of Kentucky, and University of Cincinnati. We started with nothing but an end goal, to visualize sustainability and collaborate on ideas and plans across multiple schools. We started by approaching the idea of sustainability and what it meant to each student in the team at Miami.

With this research we came up with the idea of a sculpture that was manipulated by the people that came in contact with it throughout the day and week. These mild progressions would end up with a sculpture that would become more beautiful the more that people on campus participated in sustainable acts. This idea developed into one that would expand to all schools, creating a flower sculpture that would bloom alongside the sustainable acts of each school. This time, though, the schools would each affect one petal, creating competition amongst schools to become more sustainable and create a more beautiful sculpture in the end. This project is called Bloom.