“Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty has many faces, changing from place to place and across time, and has been described in many ways”
Our group chose the theme of poverty to voice out the people who are not being heard. We were all heading towards a more compassionate subject and so we decided to choose poverty. It also related to the Alice Austen museum we discussed in the seminar class. That discussion really triggered our individual ideas in terms of the structure; the coin was pre-decided to the sketches.
When our sketches were brought together, we picked out a bit from every design. From my sketches, we picked out the design of the closed eye, which represents the ignorance of the larger public who witness the hardships of the poor and yet do nothing about it. From Arianna’s we chose the quote “Poverty is the Worst Form of Violence” by Mohandas K. Gandhi. It was chosen because so many people tend to call attention to physical violence and gun violence, but no one realizes the type of violence poverty is. Then, we chose the idea of having two hands in the begging position from Aamina’s sketches. The hands are a universal symbol of poverty, and when looked at, one instantly knows the theme.
We used plaster of Paris and alginate to make the hands. I was more involved in getting the materials and finding ratios to mix them together. Arianna and I also took out the hands from the mold once it was dry. I think it turned out well the second time. The first time when Elizabeth and I tried to do it, 2 of the fingers broke because of mishandling it and lack of communication. I also made the illustrator file that had the right line thickness for laser cutting and template of what was on the coin. Even the coin needed 2 attempts to make it perfect. With the first coin, it burnt from the sides in the laser because the wood was too thick and so we repeated it with a thinner one. The black portion on the file would be engraved and the rest would remain as an outline.
If there is something that I’d spend more time on next time would be the color of the hands. I think making it black made it more controversial which I didn’t think about. Our intention was to display poverty and that’s the first color we thought about. Black also makes it prone to more comments about racism. I would color them a bronze-y color to show that it is made out of bronze. I also would try and make it interactive in a way that it doesn’t conceal its meaning and become a form of amusement. But as a team we tried and put in things in a very minimalistic context seeming more contemporary, as if it is a new issue but actually it’s a problem that is deep-rooted in the past.
