Professional Profiles, pt. 1 [introduction]

This course is also run by Dutch designer Herman Hermsen, and involves the design and execution of an exhibition of student work – small-scale series production available for sale. Part of the theory behind this exhibition is that during times of economic instability, buyers are less likely to invest in expensive, one-off artworks, while simultaneously being skeptical of mass-produced goods from large-scale manufacturers.

For the maker, this opens up a niche – handmade pieces from independent designers at a reasonable price point are now more desirable to the market.

The exhibition has 9 student participants, mostly final-year or masters students (which makes me more than amateur…) who are each developing their own marketable range of products – wearables, accessories or decor pieces.

So how can we make a coherent exhibition out of this broad range of work? It seems that the contemporary jewellery scene is the only place where it is commonplace to exhibit production pieces. Of course, the dichotomy of exhibiting jewellery is that it almost negates the function of the pieces themselves — what is a piece of jewellery if it is behind glass, without a body, a wearer, a life? It becomes and empty object, the dialogue of the piece is changed, overlooked.

To me, these pieces need to communicate something about their context. For me, there is a constant struggle to justify my making production pieces in a world that is already flooded with products. Empty objects, only given purpose by the consumer, to be returned to emptiness once the next-gen designs appear.

The concept of inbuilt obsolescence in products keeps me awake at night. Perhaps this is why a can empathise with the works of makers like Karen Ryan, Marc Monzo and Denise Reytan.

In order to deal with these anxieties, I find myself drawn to forgotten objects as a basis for my work. Jewellery, being a highly personal and communicative medium, seems an apt place for re-contextualising these ‘lost’ objects. At the same time as making production pieces, I want to subvert the concept of mass-production itself. But how?

For the last 3 years or so, I’ve been working on an ongoing production series of ‘Teacup rings’. These rings are constructed from the handles of second-hand melamine teacups which were in production in Australia between the 1950s-1970s. During this time, melamine was a fashionable material for kitchenalia, picnic ware and crockery. I buy the cups from op-shops, garage sales and estate sales. Each wearable piece is hand-carved and unique. The shapes in the pieces reference the original lines of the products from which they are derived, as well as the natural movements of my tools when I carve. If you are interested, the pieces are available from Workshop Bilk.

I’ve decided I will keep working along this theme, using vintage plastics from abandoned mass-produced objects. Aesthetically, I like the concept of referencing the original forms. I have begun a few experiments, but more on that soon.

I’m also in charge of the graphic design/marketing team for this exhibition, this means there’ll be logo/identity design, packaging, promotional material, website and installation work to follow, too. 

KONFRONTATION, pt. 5 [looking for patterns]

Illustration by Amanda Nedham

Amanda Nedham’s History of Violence I

Illustration by Amanda Nedham

Illustration by Amanda Nedham

Illustration by Amanda Nedham

Illustration by Amanda Nedham

Amanda Nedham’s Sleep of Reason II

Lisa Solomon’s doily body : brain, 2006, colored pencil and embroidery on duralar, 12 x 9 inches

Lisa Solomon’s doily body : heart, 2006, colored pencil and embroidery on duralar, 12 x 9 inches

Lisa Solomon’s doily body : gut, 2006, colored pencil and embroidery on duralar, 12 x 9 inches

Lisa Solomon’s chloroform, 2007, acrylic, colored pencil, graphite, embroidery on duralar, 6 x 6 inches

Lisa Solomon’s dimethyl mercury, 2007, acrylic, colored pencil, graphite, embroidery on duralar, 12 x 16 inches

Lisa Solomon’s dimethylformamide, 2007, acrylic, colored pencil, graphite, embroidery on duralar, 12 x 16 inches

pattern design for CNC milling.

pattern design for CNC milling.

Here are some illustrations I’ve been looking at as inspiration for a basis for my scrimshaw and pyrography work.

Amanda Nedham

Lisa Solomon

Nic di Genova 

After some experiments with hand techniques, I got thinking that it might be nice to try some mechanical engraving (perhaps in combination) on my bone pieces. I have designed some engraving patterns to be CNC milled into some bone pieces – more next post on that. 

 

Art <3 for Karen Ryan

Wood work light

Wood work light

Wood work light

Second hand plate

Second hand plate

Second hand plate

Custom made Chair

Custom made Chair

Custom made Chair

I stumbled across this Dezeen article on Karen Ryan last week, and I can’t get her work out of my head.

Ryan uses ‘used’ objects to create amazing graphic-inspired objects which make a strong social comment about consumerism and the obsolescence of products.

She manages to find a place as a product designer amidst a sea of mass-over-production. Very poetic and thought-provoking, whilst being aesthetically very edgy and fresh.

Her personal website has a link to her Flickr photostream, showing objects and process from previous collections.

KONFRONTATION, pt. 4 [process + transcendence]

Both material and process are an integral part of this project. I am continuing my exploration into materials, simultaneously confronting my fears surrounding them.

My first experiments with pigskin involved removing the pieces from the feet (which were bought from the supermarket, and later boiled to obtain bone material) which were covered with a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and table salt. They were left in the sun to dry out and preserve. Unfortunately, the skin was crudely sliced, and ended up being thick, lumpy and mostly unusable.

My second attempt at skin preparation involved carefully slicing the material (this time from a back-rib cut of pork) and scraping the fat and ligament tissue using a large kitchen knife. This work-intense process breaks down the fat cells in skin, compressing the layers into a much finer, semi-translucent skin. It also meant that I extracted a vast amount of pure pig fat, which is visible as a creamy white substance in the photos below. I am coping a little better when dealing with animal materials now, and was able to sleep after doing this one…
My hands are visibly softer today, too. I think there is something kind of poetic about this process.

I mounted this new piece onto some wood, stretching it out using pins to keep it from contracting and rolling up. It is now drying, and should be ready for working in a few days.

Meanwhile, I’ve been considering the techniques which I might use with these materials. Scrimshaw is the very old technique of hand engraving into bone or ivory and filling the engraved surface with India ink to create drawings. Traditionally, the imagery depicts maps, animals, typography, portraits and nautical scenes (it was a popular past-time among whalers). I like the poetic metaphor of scarring the surface of the material, making stories into histories. I found a few helpful tutorials: Female scrimshander Viveca demonstrates her technique on mammoth ivory, using oil paint as a fill; Mark A DeCou’s tutorial uses powder horn and printer’s ink; while Michael Sheppard’s site gives an insight into the history of scrimshaw and contemporary applications of the technique. 

I am also fascinated by the idea of marking the skin, either via a crude form of tattooing, or perhaps pyrography. Belgian artist Wim Delvoye tattooed live pigs, which lived as artworks, and were taxidermically preserved post-mortem. Pyrographers traditionally use leather or wood as a drawing surface, upon which marks are burned using a hot metal tip (like a soldering iron). Sue Walters works with some less usual materials like paper and vegetable ivory (tagua nut) and makes remarkably high-fidelity work. I’d also like to try this technique on bone, too.

I have also begun to consider and experiment with other techniques; superfine crochet based on Irish crochet; various types of hand-worked embroidery (cross stitch, needlepoint, whitework, etc.) More on technique in the next few posts, I think.

 

Without overanalysing, I think I am drawn to these intricate, repetitive and time-consuming techniques as a way of transforming and connecting (or is it re-connecting?) with the materials. And those who know me well know also of my compulsive hand-work as an anti-anxiety activity…

Pig ribs with skin on – top view

Pig ribs with skin on – underside view

pig skin – flayed, unscraped

pig skin – flayed and scraped, fat removed

pig skin – flayed and scraped, fat removed, underside

pig skin – flayed and scraped, fat removed, top view

prepared pig skin, salted and stretched for drying

pig skin – early tests – deemed unsuitable

pig skin – early tests – deemed unsuitable

KONFRONTATION, pt. 3 [getting under the skin]

I’ve been considerably frustrated by his project over the last week — the mixed responses from people have forced me to rethink my approach.

On one hand, people have been confronted by the process of the project thus far, seeing the full visceral nature of the material, but on the other hand, the feedback I’m getting from other people in the class is that it’s simply not confronting enough through materials alone.

I’ve been thinking a lot about concept and communication through making. someone once said to me that in order to communicate a concept through objects, you must peel back the layers of meaning and metaphor so that the idea is basal. So that the concept can be communicated simply. It seems obvious — viewers will layer their own meanings on to the form, you needn’t weigh it down with excess metaphor.

I began to consider the reasons behind my revulsion of the violent acts, behind the cruelty, the flesh. I thought about the time when I decided to stop eating meat, when the feelings of revulsion were at their highest.

It began in 2003. I was barely 18, in my first semester of a design degree, living at home, It was in January of this year that my home town was hit by serious bushfires. My mother and sister got caught in the path of the fire whilst trying to rescue my sister’s horse, and were seriously injured. My mother received second and third degree burns to over 30%, and my sister over 65%.

In the weeks and months following, both of them underwent multiple procedures and surgeries in an attempt to save their lives. There were kidney failures, collapsed lungs, tracheotomies, amputations, muscle grafts, skin grafts, skin and bone debridement, and multiple serious infections. Bodies deconstructed and reconstructed. Somehow, both of them made it through, and enjoy a relatively good quality of life today (in no small part due to their incredible strength, determination and depth of character).

Of course, the initial shock of learning the ill fate of a loved one is severely distressing, but nothing could have prepared me for the visceral horror I was to experience over the course of that year.

I remember in full, vivid horror my first sighting of my mother and sister, in the Intensive Care Unit. Having been airlifted to a specialist unit in Sydney, my dad and I had risen early on the Sunday-after-Black-Saturday to make the three-hour drive [in absolute silence].

In a reclusive ‘mediating room’, we were given a two-hour ‘prep’ from the head burns specialists as to the current conditions. They informed us of the present, asked about the past, and talked only about the immediate future. As if the week after that didn’t exist. They described with typical frankness what the bodily state of the patients were, in numbers and science, in probabilities and cold, hard facts. The full extent wouldn’t be clear for at least a week, but it was at present not promising.

Then, my father and I were led into the ICU.

I will never forget the smell of that place. Heavy chemical disinfectant, masked with a heady, unrealistic floral perfume. Heavily sweet ammonia, struggling to mask the saltiness of stricken bodies, of plasma and sweat and blood and protein. Like one is the antithesis of the other, and somehow they are meant to make a neutral product. There are still certain supermarkets I can’t enter because of that smell.

We were led past elderly people with the rattle of imminent death in their lungs. Past overdoses, past diabetic comas, past organ failures, heart attacks, strokes. Past people hooked up to machines, machines that breathed, pulsed, pumped. Machines that beeped and hummed and beat in a tired, stagnant rhythm. I hated that place. It was a machine. Senseless. Giving and taking life, like some absurd, impulsive god. A Deus ex Machina.

At what was almost the end of the line, I peered through an almost shut curtain, seeing a morbidly obese shape, bloated, heavy, straining under the weight of breath and machine. A swollen, amorphous shape. But when our guides stopped short of the end of the room, I knew something must have been wrong. Very wrong.

That mass of flesh, it was them. One of them. I couldn’t tell which one. Their bodies, in a state of extreme trauma, ballooned up with fluids. So much so, that the skin on their limbs and hands had to be split [through all layers] via scalpel. In this situation, no pressure bandages are applied. The skin was heavily damaged – pink and black, wet with fluids and patched up with squares of mesh dressing – white and soaked with blood and yellowing plasma.

I couldn’t tell them apart. Not immediately, anyway. It is profoundly disturbing to not recognise your own relatives. Those unconscious mechanisms we have for facial recognition hit a wall. I was overwhelmed by this intense absurdity. Simultaneous love and revulsion. The grimace on their faces – massively swollen lips pulled back in what may have been pain, terror, or sheer physical reaction – revealed their teeth. Like what dental records are to the decomposed body, the teeth were the only recognisable remnants of my mother and sister. Yellow-white teeth, still straight, regular, defiant.

I have included below images of patients with similar injuries, which will give you an impression of the physical trauma associated with severe burns – but I must warn you, they are GRAPHIC and REAL and I don’t really think you need to look at them to understand the nature of the subject.

It is impossible to empathise with someone in this state. I say impossible because the I think that if you were somehow able to comprehend being conscious in that horrific state, feeling the sensation (or lack of sensation, as is experienced with severe nerve damage associated with full-thickness burns) of a forever-changed, forever-changing state. I have felt so much guilt for being unable to comprehend that. For dissociating my concept of them from the reality of them. It has taken so long to reconcile those two things. I still have not reconciled my guilt.

So then, what becomes of the KONFRONTATION project? For me, material and process becomes a way to reconcile these memories. More on material and process in the next post.

I must also add this link to the Boston Globe website, as it houses some dramatic imagery from the recent bushfires in Victoria, Australia. The images show the cruelty and fragility of the Australian landscape and the devastating aftermath. Again, your personal discretion is advised.

Burns victim with pressure-release cuts

Burns victim’s hand, with inserted rods to prevent permanent contraction.

Art <3 for Sarah Illenberger

  

  

I <3 you, Sarah Illenberger. You could be Michel Gondry’s younger, cooler sister.

KONFRONTATION, pt. 2 [bones and antlers]

KONFRONTATION, pt. 1 details the background to the project.

I have begun exploring bone and horn as possible materials for my project. 

I purchased a piece of hunting memorabilia – a trophy mount of the antlers of a Roe deer (complete with sawn-off skull fragment) – from the local fleamarket.

After a very confronting trip to the butcher, I purchased some cheap bony cuts, including sliced beef shinbone and pig feet. More confronting was having to handle the pieces themselves (having not touched meat for around six years, it is a very alien concept to me…) and extracting the usable material from the cuts.

First, the pieces are simmered for a long while in water with a bit of detergent. This helps break down the fat, marrow and remaining tissue. For me, the smell was horrendous. It was rich and heavy, and loaded with the artificial citrus of the soap didn’t help. It smelled like an old kitchen. In fact, the whole 32sqm of my flat smells like an old kitchen, despite all the windows being open, and copious amounts of air freshener. A part of me keeps telling me I shouldn’t deny myself the full extent of the experience, but my nausea dictates otherwise…

Scraping off the excess flesh and removing the marrow was also less-than-enjoyable… The marrow became this sloppy, gelatinous mass, which was to be pushed out with a brave finger. Fortunately, it revealed on one piece a stunning area of lacy, porous bone. Less than ideal for traditional carving, perhaps — but something I’d like to exploit.

After boiling away the tissues, the bones are to be sunned for at least a few days. This tutorial on bone preparation details the rest of the process, which I am yet to complete. This succinct supply and prep list is also really helpful. Luckily, most of the tools can be found on a jeweller’s bench, and I will happily improvise where necessary.

Luckily, I also obtained a small piece of pre-prepared cattle bone to play with. It is a beautiful material, dense and chalky, with subtleties of texture and colour throughout. It polishes beautifully, too. My preference is to use a nail bufffer (the dispoable kind, usually with two emery surfaces and two buffing surfaces adhered to a cushioned board), which is what I often use on my melamine pieces, after initial emery (anything up to 600). 

The smell released from the bone from carving is also pungent (though not as much as the boiling, fortunately). It has the distinct smell of umami - the proteinous aroma present in meat, mushrooms and human semen… 

I’ve included some pictures of this intitial research below, but I should warn you in advance – it’s not so nice to look at. But then, we’re all part of the system, right?

Roe deer trophy mount, sliced

Roe deer trophy mount, sliced, with skull piece

Cattle shinbone, after initial boiling

Cattle shinbone, in different stages of preparation

Cattle shinbone, after initial boiling

Pig feet, ready for boiling

Pig foot, ready for boiling, knuckle intact.

Tools for working with bone

Roe deer trophy mount, large red deer antler, cattle shinbone

{N.B. This post has been edited for clarity.}

The Text is in the Textile.

Louise Bufardeci is an Australian artist based in Melbourne who works primarily in textile pieces, subverting traditional techniques in order to explore political, ethical and social tensions. My personal favourite is the series Starter Pistols, which uses bargello, a traditional Florentine needlepoint technique, to map sound waves of gunshots from various weapons from around the world.

Happy Accidents.

Having been so quiet of late deserves explanation….

It looks as though I’ll be going on exchange to Germany early next year, to study at the Fachhochlschule Dusseldorf - {University of Design & Applied Sciences, Dusseldorf}.

As such, I’ve been busily designing a portfolio, making a website, writing applications, a curriculum vitae – not to mention all the other travel necessity nasties. Moreover, it’s sent me into a bit of a financial panic (just like the rest of the general populus, I suppose…) so I’ve decided to get cracking and start selling some of my wares.

Hence – Happy Accidents. has been launched!

I’ll be selling hand-made and hand-altered wares including jewellery, vintage clothing, paper goods and other small treasures. I think I’ll try as bet I can to document the process here, which could be helpful to other budding Etsians. Feedback I always appreciated, too!

I’ve listed a small few items, with more to come on a weekly basis. I’ve tried to refine the colour palette and aesthetic to keep it graphic and eye-catching, and reflect the pieces. It’s surprisingly difficult to create decent product photography without the use of studio equipment — currently I’m using sunshine and polystyrene sheet (as reflectors).

Watch this space.

i vote for art

i vote for art is an online boutique where artists and designers can sell their works interantionally. It works in a similar format to Etsy, and has a cute feature which allows the general public to vote on favourite works by the click of a button.

It’s a very sweet concept, but I kind of wish it wasn’t limited to 2D works – artists may sell original paintings, and limited or open edition prints – but I suppose drawing the line around 3D works is more complicated, and risks treading on the toes of etsy…

Nonetheless, its always wonderful to see fledgling galleries offering this kind of publicity to independent artists.