Parks Through an Artist’s Lens – Emma

For my senior project, I studied the way urban communities plan their natural spaces. I chose to complete this study through an artist’s lense, as our city’s natural spaces are like works of art themselves. For the first few weeks of my project, I visited parks and gardens in all five boroughs. While I was in these spaces, I reflected on the ways they were laid out, and tried to figure out how their designers optimized the space they had. To further my reflections I sketched and painted my surroundings. 

Throughout senior year I have been working with my art teacher, James French, to learn about woodworking. It’s a trade I have always been interested in, and I wanted to continue this study in Senior Project. Woodworking is all about planning; before starting any project you need to go through a long process of laying out materials, making measurements, making sure everything lines up, and much more. For me, the planning phase sometimes took longer than the actual build. Because of this, I felt it worked with the nature of my essential question, which is about how cities plan their parks. 

Parks can be very diverse in terms of what’s in them, but I concluded that almost all parks try to give people the space to do 5 things: rest, play, be physically active, be in nature, and gather together with other people. I created five pieces, which each represent one of these aspects. I used a combination of prepared lumber and natural materials I collected while I was visiting parks. I was able to learn a lot more about the skills and nuances of woodworking, and I now feel like a much more proficient woodworker.