On Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black record, she writes “love is a losing game.” This song frequented my playlist as I worked on my final studio project, and I felt like it described the void of mixed feelings I put into my work.
As a whole, my final Integrative Studio 2: Fashion project explores the myriad emotions that reflect the adolescent experience as a young woman moving to New York City and looking for herself in the expansive grid of the city. The diary/journal format of this project that I chose to encase the collages I created on each of the about 300 pages allows the project to feel personal, intimate, and raw. I purposely wanted my project to encompass a chunk of my heart, dreams, feelings, etc. upon each of the pages. Opening the photographic diary sprinkled with text feels like you’re entering into a piece of my being, where you feel a story stringed along throughout the pages that show growth and change throughout the ways color and text can influence emotions and experiences. Living in New York City for the first time after dreaming of it for so long is daunting and scary all the while being exhilarating and fabulous at the same time, and I sought to convey this grey area of feeling throughout my final project.
I had used collage in different mediums and approaches in my prior two studio bridge projects, so I decided to continue with it in my final project. Since the final project was intended to build upon previous projects and their components, I felt like the medium of collage would best serve my project. My idea was to preserve these found images, my own images, mementoes I had gathered since starting college, and even some of my own writing into a journal. I wanted the journal to feel deeply personal, as if one feels when opening it and examining the pages that they are dipping into someone’s personal diary that they shouldn’t otherwise be reading. It’s this sense of feeling out of place, as if entering another world outside of oneself.
This project allowed me to explore different emotions and feelings in connection with colors, places, text, etc. by playing around with the arrangement of the collages on each page of the journal. I printed over 100 pages of collage material, continuously cutting out each image with my Olfa knife and ruler, placing the images into different piles based on size, and continuously working the arrangement of the images on each page before paper cementing each piece of paper down. The process was ever-evolving and a labor of love that spanned across each day of the final month of school. I hope that when someone glances at the thickness of the journal or begins to turn each page, they feel the heart I poured into it. Art is inherently personal, and I view my project as a personal manifestation of my first year at college and the ways in which I have grown.
The creation process:
The book:
Select Pages:
