Fine Art- Week two (2 weeks) : Deconstruction and Reconstruction

  Today, I worked in the Fine Art classroom working with a pair of jeans, I approached this by finding all different kinds of ways that I could deconstruct, destroy, and use the jeans in as many ways as I could. 

I began the deconstruction process by unpicking the legs and pockets off of a pair of black skinny jeans unaware of where my idea was going yet, but wanted to begin the deconstruction process and leave the outcome open to generate as I went along with the process. As I began to unpick the jeans more and more I decided to make plaster moulds of certain details on the jeans such as pressing the pockets into clay, the zipper, the seam and the cuff of the jeans as the clay picked up all of the texture from the jeans. To print the jeans into the clay I rolled out terracotta clay at an equal size every time using the roller guides and then laid the area of jean that I want to print on top of the clay, carefully pressing it slightly so that all of the detail gets picked up in the clay. Once I printed the jeans into the clay I then made walls/barriers using the clay that were slightly thicker than the base clay and put them in a square shape around the impressed print, then to seal any gaps or holes in the clay I used sausages of clay and smoothed it out so that all areas are covered stopping the risk of any leaks when the plaster is poured in. I repeated the same method repeatedly for multiple areas of the jeans until I had enough plaster prints of the areas I then left the plaster to dry then removed it from the clay by removing the four walls one by one and gently pulling it from the clay. I then put two pencils underneath each plaster mould and left them until they was fully dry before positioning them how I wanted them for photos. 

           

I think that the de-moulds of the plaster worked extremely well as the clay picked up every little detail from the frayed edges with a slight bit of cotton to the stitching on the cuff of the legs, this worked well because I pressed the jeans into the clay hard enough so that it would pick up all of the details without becoming uneven. What didn't work as well was the walls as some of them began to crack from me reusing the dried clay from the previous casts which caused a few leaks from the plaster seeping through. If I was to do this again I would try it with another item of clothing or even more natural objects such as leaves or flowers to experiment using something much more fragile for printing into the clay. 

Based on my evaluation above I could improve on my practice by using fresh clay to seal any gaps from walls of older dried clay and just reuse the walls from the plaster moulds you have already done to prevent waste of clay. Also to get a lot of detail from the jeans or object in the clay then roll the rolling pin over the top gently while keeping the guide sticks there so it doesn't become uneven. To develop my work more I have the idea of using the threads from the unpicked jeans and connecting the plaster moulds together by hanging the threads from them across the pair of jeans that I cut/unpicked to leave only the seams. I think that this was successful because I got in-depth details from the jeans using the plaster and I think it was such a fun creative idea to hold them up over the areas where I printed that section, I feel as though I executed the design very well and it all came together well. 

Outcome Photos