I had put down Ann Demeulemeester on the list, she is one of my favourite creatives and is a fashion designer that I really do admire. However, when looking at the list that was given to me, Ann’s work didn’t seem like the smartest choice to base off for a response. Mainly due to the fact that with her collections, the zeitgeist and aesthetics slightly shift every 6 months and it would be more than challenging for my peers to be able to identity my response with her work. There were also a number of people on the list that I were really unfamiliar with, namely – Carrie Mae Weems, Jun ToGawa and James Gurmey among a few others. The artist that I was most familiar with and had visual cues in their works which the viewer would immediately be able to connect with was Georgia O’Keeffe.
Her works involving flowers and folds is instantly recognisable. Some people seem to connect with her pastel tones, others with the flowers that seem to be suggestive of the female genitalia, but on my end, it was the folds in the flower petals and the way that they seem to thoughtfully composed within the work. That was what I based my response off of, I took brown paper bags and cut them in organic, rounded shapes and pieced them together. Initially, the idea was to have it replicate a flower, but as the piece began to take shape and I had little intention in making the individual ‘petals’ look like actual petals, the piece began to take a more organic shape. I do appreciate that added layer within the piece as I find it much more interesting as it does remind me of how each and every flower in the world is different in one way or another; and I won’t ever be able to exactly recreate my response ever again as opposed to if I had meticulously cut out each individual piece in a template format and had planned out how to piece them together.
