selected works from the past month. it’s a bit too much to cram it all into one post, so i’m spreading it up.

back with a cat

due to lots of hojskole work, moving back home, finding a job and generally getting life sorted out, i unfortunately had to put this blog on a hiatus. but now that my first month of art classes is almost over, i figured it’s a good opportunity to fire it up again. i plan on continuing this blog as a documentation diary, to keep an overview of my work and, hopefully, track of my progress. i’m just finishing up preparing my most interesting worspieces from this month for uploading – in the meanwhile, here is my cat in all her grumpy glory.

side project: portraits & water-colour

project 7: surface design – process pictures

project 7: surface design

working with fabric for a change! plastic fabric, to be exact, or polyester, to give it another name. it was wrapped around objects and sticks or folded between papers, then steam-cooked for an hour. the result is strongely deformed pieces of cloth that can be used in interesting new ways.

inspiration for my final project was taken from the paintings of diego velasquez. the stiff, “sewn-in” women of the baroque period seem to be completely unable to move, walk, or just breathe. so i tool a comfortable, strechy black dress, and set about making it uncomfortable, impractical and constricting.

i bought a cheap dress from h&m and cut into it at the shoulder and the hip, then extended the newly created space with wire-crinolines in odd shapes.
my chosen fabric was white organza, because i wanted to dye it in blue, green and yellow. this is did using special heat-activated colours, which were first painted onto paper, then transferred to the cloth via heat-press.
then i wrapped syrofoam balls in various sizes in the cloth, steaming it for an hour. this was a very long process, as i could only work in squares of 40 x 40 centimeters, and i had a little over 2 meters of organza to go through. the result, however, was worth it!

i applied the deformed patches onto the crinolines, sewing freehand because the cloth was very bouncy and needed to be kept loose. the wires were not covered up completely, to show off the structure underneath.
furthermore i cut out the neckline to make it wider, and added wires around the midsection to reference a corset.

i spend quite a few nights on this project, and am very glad i did. to my surprise, i was even able to put it on without scratching myself bloody.

project 6: typotektur

phase 1: the drawing machine

we were to collect shapes from 5 more or less randomly chosen images of an assigned city. with these, we had to devise three “drawing machines” – mechanisms & rules, that is, to create shape combinations we would not usually think of.

my city was cape town – awesome! never been there, what a great opportunity for research.

my three tries:
top left, abstract shapes using a fold-cut pattern taken from the map of the city.
bottom right: black circles with negative space created by an edgy pattern crated from the slum rooftops.
bottom left: traced elements of the cityscape, mixed freely to create letters. i ended up using this idea.

phase 2: building an alphabet

putting together more and more letters in new combinations, i figured out which shapes were especially useful, which ones created nice contrast. i threw away some shapes, traced new ones – a fun and intriguing process. finally, i had my library of shapes selected and was ready to go into…

phase 3: the tag line

to “promote” our city, we were to find a funky tag line – time to hit the internet and dig up some basics on cape town. i finally settled on ONE FRUITY BOWL – a reference to the geographic bowl the city is built in & the colourful mix of people who live there.

setting it up in my letters, figuring out the spacing and alignment, the hardest part was actually choosing a background colour… so i made a few small mock-up posters to test colours and arrangements.

phase 4: blow it up

now to make an a1 poster out of my material! after much tinkering, it was sent off to the printers, and came back a week later. and here it is!

project 5: dissociative zine

for this project, i used radomly assigned words to search for pictures online:

sell bad information

and chose 40 i liked. next cae the text. again, two random words acted as a searchlight:

face masters

to dig up 40 in a completely unrelated book (about communal living in germany). these were paired each with the images in a humorous, sarcastic or poetic way. the results were frequently quite a bit surrealistic, powerful imagination fuel, & wonderfully weird.

out of these, i chose 8 pairs to start building the zine. our dimensions were one A3 sheet folded to make 4 pages, with a poster printed on the “inside”. i went through many, many revisions – re-searched for images, re-appropriated sentences, pondered the layout, played with proportions. i also looked for a connecting theme, both contextually and visually. i found it in the topic of homes and borders, though that is a very loose foundation for the the many purposefully contrasting images and messages i used.

all in all, an entertaining and tricky endeavour – and a fantastic exercise in monty-python-esque montage.