New Semester, New Theme

I spent all summer thinking up a new theme for this semester of jewelry resulting in A Walk in the Woods. Although it is yet another nature theme I hope that it is enough of a variation to be different. The key to this is to look at the theme as nature tamed, as in scaled down to the things in our own backyards and parks. A quick example of this is my only idea so far for this, some Coke bottle caps arranged around a Pepsi cap by means of wire and rivets in order to resemble queen ann's lace:

        

This = This, apparently.

But this has nothing to do with the actual first project of the the year which is chasing and repousse. I'm looking forward to properly learning the technique this time, and am even enjoying making the tools, but I'm not as enthused about the project itself. I have never really enjoyed making narratives in art which is probably some strange result of trying to come up with a uniquely interesting comic strip when I was a kid, the naturally being what the project is on. So far all I have is a necklace that has repoussed elements cycling through the stages of a forest fire. To get ideas I've quasi-coincidentally bought a book called Weeds at Border's liquidation sale.

See? It's True!

Thus I have plenty of time to meditate on this problem (and read a book) until my pitch bowl arrives around September 7th!

Space Age Onion

Some time ago I mentioned getting in a book from the library called Where's My Space Age? and I was able to read it cover to cover. I'm still reeling from the disappointment a week later. By reading this book I had hope to pick up some quick inspiration, and learn about a design aesthetic. What I got was how these designs reflected the hopes, dreams, and fears of the society that spawned them, and how quickly the Space Age movement of the 1960s was crushed by reality; in this case the tumultuous decade of the 1970s.

As nice as it is to know how what the public thought about space and the future when it was a new frontier, it doesn't help from a design perspective. The book told me that synthetics were big, using old materials in new ways was big, (paper dresses anyone?) and so were impractically curved forms and mass produced modularity. But, the book never really told me any of the why, or the how for that matter. Why does this curve and that sphere mean "it's the future!" and not others? How come one leg or three legs or no legs on a chair automatically make it "modern" Space Age design?  I wanted hard compositional design analysis instead of interpretations about what these pieces mean. Perhaps I'll have to look elsewhere...

I guess the book was something like an onion, layer upon layer of disappointment the further I got into it. Speaking of which I've come home for spring break where we made an... interesting discovery in the basement:

Yep, an onion sprouted in the basement all by its lonesome self, just chilling in the bag with the rest of them. So, I decided to plant it in a pot for now, and I guess this summer we'll have lots and lots of onions!