Jennifer Wang
Space & Materiality
Dinner Party Final Project
December.18th, 2019
For the final project, I decided to make a traditional Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner. Dumplings with hot sauce has always been the most important dish other than hot pot. My family gather together and make dumplings every year.
Process:
Sketch:
Table Arrangement that we came up with as a class.
I altered a bowl with acrylics and stickers first.
I made dumplings with clay. No colorings because I will add the hot sauce by the day I present them in class.
Second step is casting my hand in alginate and plaster.
The fingers were too fragile. I wanted to do a hand gesture of holding the bowl, but accidents happened.
So I decided to add the concept of fingers sticking in hot sauce due to my naughty childhood habit – I could never wait until everybody sat down to the dinner table and I always sticked my fingers into hot sauce to taste it.
Third step is the fabric alteration and making a stack of wood blocks, I hand sewed three pieces of fabrics together into a table cloth and painted flower patterns on it with acrylics. And I arranged wood blocks into a weird balance because it means every new beginning of a year will have a great start and rise up higher in Chinese. So I made this platform to elevate the bowl of dumplings. I also added stickers to it to make the project more playful.
Forth step is making chopsticks with dowels. I cut the dowels with an art knife.
I brought the hot sauce to class and poured it onto the dumplings before presenting because it will rot if I did it the night before our class.
Peer Review:
Oluschi’s project is my favorite of all. First of all, everything looked very realistic and fun. I was surprised that most of the things were not real, even the cotton. I liked the crab for the most and I think there was a student asking her did her cast a raw crab, but she didn’t. The crab was made of clay and acrylic paint. I think she was put a lot of effort into her projects. Oluschi never picked the easy way to do things, and she has such high standards of making art. If I was her, I would probably cast a crab and then paint it because it will be so much more work to do with making everything with clay. And she is a good painter, the glossy finish of the crab shell is very realistic and beautiful. Move on with the crab, I noticed that she printed a newspaper onto a piece of fabric. It was not as noticeable as the seasoning box or the jar of cotton, donuts that made of clay or the hammer, but the newspaper fabric is a great detail and added more cultural vibes to the piece. Oluschi obviously cared about everything that will be presented to people and will appear to be a part of her art piece. She put a lot of effort and time in her project. I never once saw her work being rushed and simply put every requirement together for grades. I really learned from her. Being more strict to oneself helps producing better art. I wonder her thought progress while developing this dinner party project and I like every thing about it.
