Postcard Diorama Rings

I'm actually really proud of these; though they aren't perfect [I can't do perfect. Obsessive, yes but perfect , never] This is the first time ever I have sketched an idea and it has come out exactly like I wanted it to. It was funny because I told my teacher he wasn't allowed to talk to me about my project [he really loves helping figure out problems and talk us through why we're doing what we're doing which is super exciting to have such a responsive and thoughtful teacher but at the same time it makes me almost always regret or rethink what I'm planning to almost disastrous ends] and he complied with my wishes though I could see it was a struggle for him not to discuss it with me. I also didn't tell anyone else what I was doing and it really helped not talking about it, just going ahead and doing it. If they asked I just screamed something like 'puppets' or something so then we nicknamed me the puppet master. And in the end that's how they turned out; toylike. I began with 100s of old postcards I found from this woman who traveled all over the place and wrote on these cards as if they were a diary or something. It was kind of sad because they were never sent to people. So I decided to bring the postcards together in a communicative way I guess...The people are from Israel and Italy, the hotels from Amsterdam, the long building from Sweden, the cars from Norway, and the mountains from Austria. I have many more cutouts from all the places she traveled and would like to continue making these interchangeable landscape rings. I think they're fun and it's a new way to do what used to do all the time, collage images, but in a wearable way. I'd like to work with silver or something though...nickel is such a bitch to work with: most jewelers despise and disown it because it's so brittle and hard and stupid and super poisonous. For some reason it's the only metal I work with. I guess I like killing myself faster than I thought.

Moonscope

This was my 'final' for casting. I reused my basket from my textiles final from last semester and inverted a sand casted glass dome into it so that you could look through the bottom of the basket as if it was a telescope or a kaleidoscope. I then made another basket to accompany the telescope but instead had the dome protruding and inserted a light on the inside of the basket. The lit one was less successful than the telescope so I'm not going to show it. It was very satisfying to hold and look at different light sources. The texture of the sand casted glass created a sun or moon scape depending on the strength of the light source. I think people enjoyed it and they encouraged me to go bigger with different lenses and different materials. I'm really excited about continuing the idea and surprised myself by looking through a sketchbook from last year and finding a similar construction/idea that I had wanted to make. I'm glad my head tricks me into thinking something I think I haven't thought before.