Wearable Art: Cultural Commentary

In 1930's Germany, their currency was worth so little that it was actually more economical to clothe oneself in one's physical paper money rather than using it to buy clothing. I wondered why nobody thought of this before, and it turns out because paper money is a really, really ineffective at clothing the human body. It doesn't behave like cloth at all- something I can't believe I didn't realize before I started treating it like fabric; sewing the dollars on the hanging outfit worked perfectly fine, but once the model put it on, it tore like crazy because (oh, yeah, I forgot) paper doesn't stretch. So, the outfit is constructed using a fusion of material and paper adhesive products: hand-stitching (yeah, I hand stitched it. Lots of sweat and blood involved) gluing, taping and (in some places) stapling :) 

Shout out to Daisy for modeling! Thanks sooo much, girl!

Gender Associations

This piece is about childhood, and how childhood happens to all of us, regardless of gender. Making an adult-sized "fort" from material with a chair in the middle beckons the viewer to come into the fort, appealing to their inner child. However, as an adult on a college campus, the barriers and boundaries that we have gained with age hold us back- it is not on our immediate path, it is not on the sidewalk, there is a mulch boundary around it, and what if people see us? The cuts are there to give visual depth to the piece, allowing the viewer glimpses inside, as well as providing relief to the wind so that the sheets will not blow away. November 2012

Cardboard Furniture

The rocking horse made from cardboard was a group project. The idea of choosing a rocking horse was my idea, and I put in the most time out of the other group members, constructing the rocker (twice) and spray painting the entire project, texturing the mane and fine tuning the ribbing on the horse.

October/November 2012

Styrofoam: Oh, I See

I constructed this piece to point out Ernest Trova's Profile Canto series on campus. They are unusual, abstract, larger than life shapes that resemble a human or humans only from a certain angle. In this case, the viewer could only see the human face if they were standing over it- something hard to do since  the sculpture was standing in an elevated garden bed. 

We were only allowed to use numbers or symbols to get our point across. The OIC is a shortened way of saying "Oh, I See!" with an arrow on the bottom half of the I, pointing towards the place the viewer would need to stand in order to see the human face. 

October 2012

Concept/Theme Piece

The concept of this piece is "from trash back to nature" and how we reconstruct natural things from manmade trash. The flower represents our growth in environmental awareness which stemmed form the wasteful mistakes we have made in the past. The hand is made out of newspaper and chewed gum and the flower is made out of the gum wrappers. This piece is made completely out of trash. September/October 2012

Wire Project

I wanted to give the project a sense of heaviness in the feet and chest area with a feeling of lightness in the hand area, aiming for a sense of upward freedom in the reach.

Made of tire wire, September 2012.