One of Many

I love stamps. I have questions. Help.

Sewing Cards

This was a total rush job trying to scan everything I could find for a review...but here are the rest of the cards I sewed for my bookmaking class. The spacing is huge for some reason. Anyway this just means that I need to learn how to make lights so I can backlight all my pieces properly...another project another project...

Lauren Kalman

It's so disgusting but...lovelove. These are some pieces from Lauren Kalman's Hard Wear series. I normally don't like to read what artist's have to say about their work usually because it's some enlightened transcendentalist metaphysical content based thing that I can't connect back to the piece itself but I liked this part of what she had to say about these pieces: 

 "In contrast, I present gold jewelry as a vehicle to amplify taboo aspects of the body. I fabricate gold adornment to highlight where the interior body transgresses its boundaries making organs, imperfections and diseases visible. The form of the adornment often reflects malignant excrescences, such as rupturing membranes or cancerous growths. These gleaming outgrowths cause bodily residues to be shed as they spread orifices and tear skin. When the beauty of gold is alloyed with the seeping body the objects become both intriguing and repulsive."

jellOrifices

I can make anything creepy. I win. Visceral jello anyone? [this is wrong...the colors I mean...it is a deep dark red in iPhoto but then a paleish fleshiness on the web...odd...it doesn't look as good]

Gross

Failure. I don't like the way this project turned out at all. But again I always like my ideas better than the outcome. For my math final we had to do an art project incorporating/studying math in some way [welcome to art school]. Totally uninspired, totally stressed, totally didn't care at all. But then I found little T4 Bacteriophage...they kill E.coli and I thought it was appropriate given that I am sick and I think it's because people do not wash their hands after going to the bathroom and then I get to touch the dirty door handle with my cleansed hands. WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE NOT WASH THEIR HANDS! Anyway these microscopic killers have icosohedral heads so that was my connection to math. Also do not ask me to explain the 4th dimension to you..it and the 11th dimension were invented by those gentlemen who had rulers in hand when absinthe was invented. Anyway knitted a scarf thing and stitched awkward misshapen T4 around it...dumb.

Do You Think I'm Tall Enough?

Here is one of the ladders I mentioned earlier but you will read later. I had a dream about a room full of ladders that bent at the rungs and started to shake and rattle towards me. It was kind of intimidating...so I made a box of pretty ladders instead. Unfortunately photographs do not do them justice because direct sunlight is the only thing that makes them sparkle. The assignment was to make a dream into either a spinning wheel or a box in the time alloted. I only had a glue gun and wire so this is what happened. I was originally worried about the messiness of the glue but everyone really liked the shiny blobs so I made more and now want to make jewelry with hot glue baubles. [there are more ladders inside of a box but I don't have a good enough shot so make do with this lonely ladder]

Draw Your Sensitivity

I wasn't incredibly happy with this project...but I think it's an interesting idea anyway. I have no feeling in the tip of my left pointer finger from an oh so tragic meeting with a drill and a jagged piece of nickel in the jewelry studio last year and I have realized that I am always rubbing it when I'm thinking about a project...why not let other people feel the same way? I miraculously found the exact tube tamponish bandaging they used for my finger at the hospital [after I had waited 6 hours to get a needle dug into the wound to make sure there was no metal in it besides the needle of course...and was in hysterics over the fact that the women next to me had called an ambulance from dennys to pick her up because she was having trouble breathing because she smoked pot...and her last name was butts...also first time hospital lessons: head wounds should be treated immediately or they tend to fall over with only me to notice them sprawled out in the corner...so rub their sternum with your knuckles to wake them up...blue painters tape holds your severed fingers on your hand...just say that you have trouble breathing and you will be seen to immediately...save your vicodin] ok giant sidenote aside I found a huge roll of the tube bandage [which apparently can fit a small childs head as well?] and made tiny finger puppets and put needles in the pads or overpadded them. The more needles the less it hurts but people were intimidated anyway...I later added a book of transfer paper for people to draw with the finger tubes. I also punched some things in braille in the acetate but I can't remember what they say anymore. The bandaid box was a perfect fit...but I still dont like it.

Rapunzel Rapunzel

Hair pills? Yes, please. For my bookmaking final I decided to make it easier for people with trichophagia [mental illness where you pluck out your hair-which is called trichotillomania and eat it]. Rapunzel syndrome is when the hair collects in your stomach and felts together [because hair is too smooth to be digested]. I thought it was funny. I do need a drill though because hot glue just isn't cutting it anymore, though it worked for the ladder project [which inspired this structure]. I have been challenged by my classmates and Nance [I don't think I've mentioned her name yet for some reason...Nance O'banion...I want to make her my crazy fun wand waving great aunt who secretly hands me things like boxes and paper] to create either a diptych or triptych of boxes to reference each stage of the disease [with definitions please] because they didn't know of the disease in the first place and didn't get the reference. I just thought all weird strange illnesses were common knowledge...nope.

Teeth Tunnel

We were working a lot with dreams for one class of bookmaking and the tunnel book was the structure we learned for the class and I.was.so.pissed. It was so difficult for me to figure out the flap structure and I felt really dumb so I came back and proved that I could do it. This was a dream that I had awhile ago that the roof of my mouth was all leprosied and a stringy spongy mass and my teeth were starting to drip out of my mouth and I couldn't keep them inside...so why not make a book out of it!? This was obviously nothing compared to everyone else's use of the tunnel book...they were amazing.

Lost and Found [Typographical Accordion]

This was the first big project I did at the beginning of the semester for my bookmaking class. I cut a letterpress tray into thirds and hinged it so that it slides together like an accordion book. I would like to continue working on it and would also like to take better pictures of the cells now that I have set up my makeshift photo studio but I probably won't...you will never get to see the bee halves or the mold in the test tube or the word game or the pretty plastic horses and you will also never know exactly how long it took me to figure out how to spell accordion...