On the other hand, I might as well take this opportunity to blather on about how I got started working on the themes that I've been working with lately. Last spring, my Projects class was given an assignment to make a piece dealing with the idea of beauty. We went through the whole process of trying to define our individual perspectives on beauty, and I came to realize that one of the things I find incredibly beautiful is the skeletal system. There is a grace and restraint in the skeleton that is lacking from so many other things. In addition, the skeleton is an incredibly loaded image. When you see a skeleton, or even a bone, any number of associations jump to mind, death being the foremost one, and a scary thing for most people. I'm not interested in straight fear however. I'm interested in the idea of fascination- the reaction that people have that causes them to not be able to look away, or to look away and then furtively look back. In the process of working with these ideas, I stumbled on a technique of enameling that was new to me, and fell in love with it. What came out of this was a piece titled Dicephalous.
After making several pieces based mostly on the idea of fascination, I wanted to bring something else to my work. Somewhere in my research, I picked up the idea of fetal skeletons, tiny and precious, and wanted to work with those images. That became the piece I showed in my first post, Aborning, and then two later pieces, which I'll post pictures soon, probably later this week.
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