Kawai-Gojira FINAL PROJECT

Kawai-Gojira FINAL PROJECT 

  

During my peer’s speed dating critique, some of my classmates came up with the idea that I work the tabs of the mouth to be teeth. Others brainstorm with me to change the colour of the horns. While I was working on my template, I realize something… 

 

My father loves all the movies of Godzilla. I have lots of memories as a child of watching the movies of Godzilla as well as posters and artwork around the living room. subconsciously I think I created my paper sculpture to look like Godzilla even though my intentions were for a little Dinosaur T Rex. He came out a little too cute for Godzilla, so I created the name Kawai- Gojira. 

Gojira is the original Japanese name for Godzilla. Kawai a Japanese term that can be used for humans or non-humans that are charming, vulnerable, shy, and childlike.  

  

After the horrific bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Lucky Dragon 5 incident Japanese artists created Gojira to conceive the trauma of these events. With the characteristics of Gojira in mind, I decided to add a little detail of red spots onto the body of Kawai-Gojira as well as change the horns and eyes to a red colour. I changed those characteristics to read because of the depictions of covid-19 cells that are in the media, the red receptors (spike glycoprotein) and the green body of the cell-like the green body of my Kawai-Gojira. Covid-19 has been a traumatizing pandemic for the entire world including myself I think this is an appropriate representation of Covid-19 by making the connection of Gojira to covid-19.  

As I was putting this together, I  had a lot of hiccups like breaking my printer and going into quarantine. I only had a limited amount of cardstock so I had to Tetris my designs on to the cardstock to not waste Because they only had a limited amount.

I slowly cut up the sheets and started with the smaller pieces, first like the arms and feet 

then work my way to the bigger ones 

And slowly started combining pieces together

 There is a middle strip on my object, so I decided to put together the middle strip with the details on it first and then combine the whole piece together

 

At this point, I slowly attached the strips to the main sides of the design and it was a lot of work but it came out really nice

I had to hold the piece together to make sure it didn't fall apart so because of this I did not document as much as I wanted to at this point.

Rendered version