12/09/14 - Working on a Stand

 

This workshop had me half smiling, half weeping. I thoroughly enjoyed the beginning of the workshop, aiming to simply dive into pinning the cutouts we'd made onto the mannequin and taking a more artistic approach rather than looking at creating something wearable. As this was the first time I'd worked on a dummy in this way, I suppose I focused on making 'art' in a bid to calm myself down and not get too stressed out over being unable to create something I thought could live up to my classmates' work.

When we were going around using each others' shapes to create structures on the dummies, I thought about how interesting it was to see other people's interpretations. I found myself working mainly on the left side of the dummy, whilst others appeared to smother the entirety of their dummies in paper. Just by looking around and taking note of everyone else's approaches helped me to fulfil these tasks. I believe I wouldn't have been able to fully embrace these tasks had I not also been able to survey what others were doing and mimic them whilst still maintaining my own flair.

Piecing the shapes together was the hardest workshop for me as my shapes were just far too small. It was a little discouraging to look around the room and see the incredible forms that had appeared on my classmates' mannequins but I pushed through and created some work that, although I'm not particularly pleased about, I'm glad to have produced. Were I to do this another time, I would definitely choose a larger shape with more curves as I think it was those with this shape that were the most successful in creating their structures.

The last exercise was about cutting a thin wavy line and draping it on the body, following it's natural curvature. To be completely honest, I'm not sure what I've managed to take from this. As I pinned the paper down, imagining that they were either seams or panels, I found myself imagining Stella Mccartney's AW11 mesh and polka dot body con dresses. Now that I look back, I think I should have allowed the seams to come off the mannequin at points like the shoulders. This way, my visualisation wouldn't be fixed on seeing something that clings to the body and would instead focus on the seams of structures coming off the body.