For our Wearable Sculptures project, we decided to create a conceptual connection to our visual piece. We started off from trying to make triangles, try to imagine the negative space of the human body through our object. We wanted to make something that enabled the viewer to see the missing human body and enable them to put the object on themselves to create an interactive experience. As we pushed ourselves further conceptually and artistically, we decided to make our main focus sexual harassment and how women and men are perceived by our society. Through this we wanted to create an interactive experience that enables the viewer to examine their own relationship to their physical features as well as other people’s.
We included little pieces of aluminum to reflect the viewers own reflection as they listened to androgynous cat-calls, a frequent contemporary issue. As we started making the piece we had to overcome several difficulties.
We cut about 250 7cm, 10cm and 12cm pieces of wood and sanded them to create different size triangles for our headpiece. As we had to put them together, we had struggles with the medium since none of us were entirely familiar with wood. We tried nails, which were too thick, glue guns and eded up with staple guns. After several collapses of the piece we decided to put aesthetics second and the usage of the piece first. This is how we got to recording several of the sexual harasses with a steady, male voice. Within this we wanted to submit these audios to bluetooth pieces given to the audience by us to enable an intense experience.
As we put the pieces together, we decided to create a basic structure so the object feels both heavy and uncomfortable; which is our main goal in regards to the feelings that our piece would arise. The object has to be held with both hands due to its delicacy which gives them an idea of the weight sexualization carries in regards to the human psyche.
What we attempted to achieve with our wearable sculpture is a disregard for sexual harassment, treating it as a crime and spreading awareness upon it to both men and women. It was important to us to create an androgynous experience rather than just one for women to show our attitude towards it in regards to our heritance and cultural backgrounds.
