unmakings

I wonder if I started this blog as a way to feel like I am accomplishing something without really getting much done. Perhaps a product of my generation of sitting in front of the computer, it feels just like so right, and clicking ‘post’ just feels so completed and good and… ugh! Although it does seem important to be reflecting and processing and not just numbly cutting and sewing, it’s a different thing. Procrastination or not, blogging is really fun. I keep thinking about something anne wilson told me when I was working for her: She told me that she thinks of her thoughts as being written on a booklet of tracing paper, the words that continue to repeat themselves in her thoughts become bolder as they layer over each other, and some are just faint wisps buried beneath layers of other thoughts. Hopefully this blog if anything can be a place where common themes in my thoughts will reveal themselves, maybe some sort of logic will arise from it all and congeal and I’ll feel better about my brain which feels more and more like that eva hesse piece I posted below and less like a nice little booklet of transparent pages. Now, enough blogging about blogging, and on to the good stuff!

i've been using the pieces that i cut out from the garments that I make the seam drawings from, and sort of roughly sewing them together and making these extroverted/inside out raw little garments.

my next question is: how can this sort of 'fashion line' of forgotten cut outs become sculpture? i photographed the garments hanging against the wall (perhaps the wall is where i'm most comfortable making work, stemming from my painting/drawing days). but i want these things to exist in space, empty dress, where you wonder what kind of person (or creature) would wear them.

Cara emailed me (about my seam drawings):

“I wonder if I would like them better as sculpture; if they were suspended in the air somehow, (string/clear filament, startch, wire?) as if on a form. I guess I am interested in how they still relate to a body, which makes me think of the forgotten pieces as well-- I wonder if the could become some kind of mutant objects, familiar as clothing, but also distorted and strange.”

I really liked Cara’s ‘mutant objects, familiar as clothing’ suggestion, applied both to the seam drawings and also to the extroverted garments. My dad has been telling me about the fun to be had with epoxy resin/ carbon fiber, to make things from cloth, but stiffened, like a surf board. And then, behind new leaf I found a boatload of plastic wrap and I started making a mold of my body to shape the mutant clothes over. Today he helped me coat prototype pieces in epoxy so that I can experiment with making these empty mutant clothes, inside-out so you can see the seams. This is a little experiment, hanging to dry with plastic wrap inside. We'll see how it turns out!

{(interesting etymological side note, Extroversion = condition of being turned inside out, also extroverted in the psychological sense…) I like this idea that an extroverted garment is sort of like an extroverted person-- loud and open about the practical, outside social environment-- and also that you can see the labor when the piece is inside out and raw. Possible title? Extroverted something? seams and extroversions. instructions and extroversions}

And the ‘mutant’-ness of this idea reminds me of my final thesis critique with Schiff and Julia, where the two of them sort of unexpectedly described my work as grotesque (I wish I remembered the critique better because I was so tired…), Schiff brought up Eva Hesse and Julia brought up Annette Messager, an artist I had never looked at before.

The Annette Messager installation excites me because she uses the walls, floor and ceiling, the whole room, and really creates almost a freaky stage set for the visitor to derive an experience. Eva Hesse uses resin in her work in a way that i am interested in exploring, to make things that look soft and maybe even look wet, but are actually hard shells. and even though i’m not really ‘going for’ grotesque or spooky, even my music gets described sometimes as an acknowledgment that there is beauty in ugly, or something. I think as hard as I try I’ll never escape the teen witch inside of me.

(all photos are my own extroversions and prototypes, except bottom left photo is eva hesse's untitled or not yet, 1966, and the bottom right is annette messager's articulés désarticulés, 2001-2002)