Study Skills - Preparing a Proposal for Installation Art

For our installation art, we are required to prepare a proposal for it. This is covered in our Study Skills class, in which the tutor personally guides us on how to prepare a proposal. 

A proposal's structure looks like this:

• Introduction
• Objective
• Problem statement
• Idea development
• Methodology
• Outcomes
• Conclusion
• References

The tutor instructs us to prepare a rough draft on our proposal, from the introduction to the methodology, then we were to discuss about it in today's class. 

This is how the rough draft of my proposal looked like, initially:

Introduction 

Since time immemorial people have been turning to nature for signs and symbols; using an object to represent a quality or trait. They turn to these signs as guidance on what they should do in life, or to celebrate a coming of age, or in rituals. 

The idea is to choose which of these signs, whether it is one sign as a whole or a combination of different symbols, and use them to represent the self. The combination of these symbols that can help give one a sense of self and get to know them more, by choosing symbols that best describe them, can be united as one. 

It is to be presented using a combination of a papier mache sculpture 3D stained glass. 

Objective

The objectives of this project is to better understand the self and project that to others who would be viewing the finished project. It is also a way to explore how people perceive signs from a cultural, religious and social context. 

Problem statement

Signs have been used to convey meaning and understanding as well as a guidance for various cultures since the beginning, whether for religious rituals or philosophy. 

Idea development 

Currently there are little books about signs, so I am currently reading up on symbols on websites. These websites offer vast information on symbols according to religious, societal and cultural context.

For my installation art, I have chosen to work with papier mache and stained glass (or at least an alternative of it) to create a combination of a 3D sculpture of a Chinese dragon and flowers. For the introduction, I should add more detail on the concept I am working on, as well as a little bit about what installation art is and how I can combine my desired subject matter (in this case, symbols) with my concept.

The objective needs to include a brief description of what I referred to as part of my initial research (research), an analysis of how I can combine what I learned from my research together with my concept in order to create an installation art (analysis), and how I can apply this to the final installation (outcome). This is not included in my initial draft, and I needed to amend it.

For the problem statement, I should only include a few lines of what problems may occur that brought me to create my work - in this case, the problem is to adopt symbols into creating a work that describes myself, putting into consideration cultural and societal contexts, as one symbol can mean different things depending on the culture.

Ideas and development includes initial sketches and ideas on the work, working upwards to create the final sketches. So far I've only done just a few sketches, but I'll be adding more as I refine my ideas.

Figure 1: The initial idea

Figure 2: More sketches and explanations on various symbols to be used in the installation art.

Figure 3: A few studies of flowers

Figure 4: Study of Chinese dragon heads

More needs to be refined and added to this proposal, which will come soon. There are still quite a few more things I need to research on, such as alternatives to stained glass and tutorials on how to create papier mache sculptures.