this time last year

work from the Fellowship Exhibition 2010. Icelandic landscape inspired embroidery pieces. Each were hand painted warp, hand woven and hand embroidered. 

this piece was my favorite i think. it says "it calls" in Icelandic. 

the sewn map

for thesis i am also working on a map of philly in thread, to relate to the embroidery. i sewed it on Sulky water-soluble fabric in about four layers on the sewing machine. 

before i dissolved it...

detail of it before dissolving...

me spraying it away.

more pictures of the map and my thesis to follow! 

COME TO THE EMERGING ARTISTS & DESIGNERS SHOW 

Moore College of Art & Design

20th & The Parkway

Philadelphia

April 28th - May 14th

Thesis update

just got my yardage back last week, and they are a little bigger than i thought. but then again, 3 yards is 3 yards... 9 ft... 108 inches. oh yeah, and they won't be pooling on the ground. i plan on suspending them from the ceiling so the bottom just hits the floor. 

so here i am starting to embroider the yardage. it's definitely going to take a long time, but so far i have two colors done on my west philly print. yay! still a lot to go though...

some details of the embroidery done so far. 

soooo, i absolutely have so much more work to do, BUT i'm in a good spot!

unfinished project: self portrait in thread

just found this under my bed. a project i started last year on old canvas fabric. i wanted to start drawing with thread. definitely needs work but i still love it :)

side project: receipt art

so i had all these receipts that i saved for months and yesterday i finally sat down and did something with them. i made like three different things with them, but this one is my favorite so far. these are all my atm receipts from lake blue on 3rd and market, sewn together so you see my balance throughout the months and "THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT" printed on the bottom. i want to try to keep collecting receipts from there so it gets really long.

Yang Yongliang: Artificial Wonderland

Taking from the pictorial tradition of Chinese Shanshui ink paintings, photographer Yang Yongliang turns his photographs of Chinese construction and cityscapes into eerie mystical landscapes that mesh the old with the possible future. Incredibly beautiful!

dorian greyhound

just found this amazing doggie portrait on designsponge. hilarious.

dream diary

for my surrealism class we are putting together a "surrealist journal" as a class and are required to submit something that is related to surrealism/forms of surrealism/things of interest/methods of practice, etc. of our own. for example, people have submitted poetry(which was a favorite of the surrealists), drawings, interviews, etc. for my contribution i decided to keep a dream diary that describes my dreams of the previous night in explicit detail. i have done this before multiple times and i can recall my dreams almost exactly from years before because my dreams are so vivid. 

i have decided to do this for a number of reasons, and the lesser reason is for my class. if you are close to me and know me well you would know that my dreams are an integral part of my life. they have resonated with me since i was little and i quickly found out that i was given the uncanny ability to recall my dreams in full detail, and when i say "full" i mean full detail. my dreams were not only vivid and burned into my memory almost every night that i dream, but they are also bizarre. dreams are often strange and weird, but mine happen almost every night. i am grateful that i am able to remember my crazy dreams so well because it gives me the ability to reach further into my subconscious mind then other people can. i write down my dreams in fear that one day i would forget and to someday share my mind with others. this project for my class is the perfect opportunity to do such a thing, i can share my subconscious mind with others and perhaps they can further illuminate more general notions of human desire.

my dreams, although extremely important to me have not yet found a way into my artwork. perhaps no project in school has given me the opportunity to use them, but now is the perfect time to start bridging the two together and create much more intimate and personal works.

Architecture of the Future

    i had some of these pictures scanned from two summers ago because i wanted to create a print inspired from these but never came around to it. now that i see them again, i might actually do it. thought i would share these with you.

chunnel engraving

i found this awesome engraving in National Geographic magazine from a few years back, and was a compliment to a piece they were doing on the chunnel between england and france. the article in the mag was not that interesting ( i usually only look at the pictures, i know i'm like a child) but i saw this on the margins of the page. it is an 18th or 19th century engraving from england on the fear of french invasion by digging a tunnel under the english channel. i just thought this was quite fantastic. i love old engravings, tin types, photography, etc, i think they are so amazing. there is a great blog called BibliOdyssey  that features drawings and prints just of that sort, i actually have the book of their pictures i bought from barnes & noble. anyway, if you like this, you should check them out, they are one of my favorite blogs. 

rediscovered me

after flipping through my old sketchbook today i found a few self-portraits mostly from 2007. here's what i found and what i once drew. i also did a couple drawings of my legs, they are they favorite series i've done i think. after looking through these i hope to continue. it would give me something to do at least.