–Our piece ready for display–
The main idea behind our piece was to artistically make people aware of the trash that humans create. We used three main elements; brown paper, plastic, and scrap metals. Using scrap metals on a dress is unusual, but we felt that it was important to remind people that trash isn’t only plastics and paper, but it is also other things like metal. Metal has many negative effects towards the environment and we felt that idea is normally forgotten. At first, planning out what to do with the metal was fairly challenging, but as we continued to progress in our ideas, the metal ended up being an important detail. Each part of this piece was done separately because of the complexity behind creating each piece. Once we had all the individual parts, we put them together to create a dress. I can say that each of us group members really appreciate the piece due to the work that was put in.
Front:
–As demonstrated in the image above, the left side of our piece was created with recycled plastic bags. The plastic bag part was dull at first, but when the metal triangles were added, a lot of character was added to it.–
Back:
–From the back, you can see most of the brown paper and only a little of the plastic. But from the front, you can see half plastic and half brown paper. This was a detail that was created with intention, but we didn’t know if it would turn out nice. Thankfully, we took the plunge and the outcome was greater than we had imagined.–
Left side:
–From the left side, the intricate work of using brown paper is shown. The brown paper extends from the front to the back and another challenge we faced when creating this was making sure the arm hole was big enough and flexible enough for wear.–
Right side:
Closeup of the brown paper with details such as the metal scrap triangles and the plastic base layer:
— A closeup of the intricate details on the piece. As you look closer, the details such as the metal triangles and the outer layer stapled together, are clearer. In between the brown paper shapes, the melted plastic is visible and as I mentioned before, the melted plastic was a crucial part in holding our piece together through the handling process and presentation.–
Our presentation poster:
–Alongside the piece, we created a poster out of the photoshoot we did. As seen below, the poster starts out big on the left and as it moves to the right, it gets smaller. This was our way of showing progression, in terms of our own trash consuming us. It was a challenge to show progression on the poster in a non-literal way, therefore we decided that the shape of the poster should be descending from left to right. On the bottom portion of the poster, you can see trash being piled up. We took photographs of trash and piled them up on Photoshop so that we could add them to our poster and the story. Our original plan was to go into a trash alley and do the photoshoot there, but in order to create a nice looking pile, we would’ve had to handle the trash and that isn’t something any of us wanted to take part in. Therefore, we found an alternative and it ended up adding great detail to our story.–
The whole experience of creating this piece and working with my group mates was great. I learned a lot from my group mates in terms of “making.” The piece didn’t turn out perfect, but the experience we took away from it something we can be happy about.
