Old and Current Projects: Silver Trees and Man-Dresses

So I managed to get myself through the fall semester, and have started the winter one now. At some point I will get decent documentation of the works I did, but until then I will have to make do with crappy pictures taken with my crappy camera.

I've decided to try and take more photos of my works in progress, and use this blog as a way of keeping track of what I'm doing so I can remember at a later point. Getting into the habit of documenting art is never a bad thing.


Here's a look at a couple of projects. One that I've just finished working on to my satisfaction, and another one that is still incomplete. The first was my final project for my jewellery and metals class that I took last semester. It was pretty much a free choice project, meaning you can choose to do whatever you wish, as long as you used a couple of the techniques learned in class. I chose to create a forest of silver trees done with cuttlefish casting. Mostly because it wasn't that difficult a technique, and yet creates objects with a lot of visual interest. I made a total of five individual trees out of sterling silver, each one slightly different than the others. I also made two tiny brass leaves. I created a small landscape by 'planting' the trees in a base of plasticine, and then covering the plasticine in decorative sand. At first, all I had were gravel-sized stones, but they looked like boulders in comparison with the trees, so I redid the project last week once I had found the sand and a better container. Then I created a river out of glitter and some uncut gems I've had since my trip to Sri Lanka seven years ago.



I am ridiculously pleased with the result.

One of the projects that I'm working on, for my intermediate mixed media class in Fibre, is one that is tentatively called 'All I want to be when I grow up is a man in a dress.' I am intrigued by the notions of clothing and fashion, and how one's choice of clothing reflects one's gender and identity. I am interested in how clothes are assigned gender and thus how people in turn are assigned gender based simply on what they are wearing.



I made a basic dress, using a vintage Vogue pattern as a base. I wanted it to be pretty and flowing and feminine. That way once I've finished sewing crepe hair around the top of the dress, the juxtaposition between the feminine dress and the decidedly unfeminine furriness will be creepy and, hopefully, potent.



I've run out of crepe hair, and won't be getting anymore until Tuesday at the earliest. Which means that I will probably spend all of Wednesday tying bits of hair to a dress. I daresay I don't even need to say how tedious and aggravating this process is. Although, I suppose if I managed to stay up all night gluing rhinestones to paper tentacles, I can manage this.



*laughs* This is why everyone thinks artists are crazy.

Because they ARE.