I was asked whether I wanted to do something “creative” at the office for pride week, and I couldn’t help but oblige. The inspiration was a pretty logical progression: I wanted a rainbow, but I wanted something in 3D. I thought it would be neat to have the colours of the rainbow split apart and rejoin in an interactive, intertwining dynamic. This led to the idea of individually-coloured tubes. I considered making a simple tree, which would unravel at the top and spread out into branches, but I found the idea of a “Jack and the Beanstalk” installation more appealing, since it lent a certain structural mystique to it. There would be a heart suspended in the unravelled portion of the “vines,” breaking the support, and the sculpture would appear to be bursting through the floor and disappearing into the ceiling in a fantastical puff of craft-store cloud.

It was hard enough to assemble, but it was almost impossible to balance such that the top and bottom would align. It required a solid couple of hours just tweaking the shims (at the top) and the curvature of the legs (at the bottom) to compensate for the small but unwieldy forces generated by the bent tubes at the mid-section.

I titled it “ascendancy.”

Materials: vinyl tube, armature wire, spray paint.