For this assignment, you will create a Protector or Companion as a soft sculpture hybrid of (at least) two animal forms. The spirit of this assignment is to use found patterns (of two or more animals) and transform them into something creative and new by combining them together.  You are provided with felt and muslin fabrics to choose from, or you can use fabrics you have found on your own. In this assignment you will learn some technical skills of using patterns and hand-sewing, as well as develop your creativity, flexibility and experimentation.

Here are a few ideas that might inspire your direction:

• What kind of animal qualities feel protective?
• What kind of animal qualities help you feel supported or comforted?
• Imagine a trans-animal (aka an animal that wants to transition to another animal) – what would the animal be and what would it be transitioning to?
• Imagine an unusual cloning or GMO project that we have not seen before. What is the resulting animal?
• Imagine a new mythic creature and took on elements from each animal.
• Imagine a new chimera.
  • Chimera definition:
    • (in Greek mythology) a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail.
    • a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve.
    • an organism containing a mixture of genetically different tissues, formed by processes such as fusion of early embryos, grafting, or mutation.
• Feel free to play with repetition, such as you could have many legs, tails, ears, etc.
• You can also play with scale with your new animal, for example: what if the tails were exceptionally long? or the feet exceptionally big? (you can enlarge those pattern pieces by using a xerox machine)

You will also need to think about what your new animal is stuffed with. The filling will affect the feel, weight, posture, and character of the new animal. We will provide some basic polyfill stuffing material, but you can also experiment with the stuffing. Here are few possibilities:

• polyfill
• rice
• dried beans or lentils
• sand
• foam

Very important reminder:  You must add a 1/4″ or 1/2″ seam allowance on to all of the patterns when you cut them out of fabric. While most store bought patterns will already include seam allowance, these particular patterns do NOT include seam allowance so you must add them.

Come prepared to share photographs of your Protector / Companion with the class for critique. Upload documentation to the class website for the critique.

Basic Animal Patterns and Instructions:

• Templates
• Folder of Instructions

More Complex Animal Patterns & Instructions:

• Template Sheet – Side A and Side B (multiple page pdf)
• Template FULL SIZE Sheet – Side A and Side B
• Instructions

Stuffed Forms book:

• Examples of making human body forms

Viewings:

• Protector / Companion slideshow
• Patterns for Protector / Companion slideshow

Other links:

• 150,000 Botanical and Animal Illustrations Available for Free Download from Biodiversity Heritage Library
• A Natural History Compendium Catalogs Albertus Seba’s Exotic Specimens through Exacting Illustrations

Mending is a powerful way to reclaim and heal an object (or relationship) that might otherwise be discarded or set aside. Mending is also resourceful and can be very personal.  As a tradition, mending is learned and applied less often as new objects and articles of clothing are more easily attained.  In our fast-paced lives, where we have to weigh what is worth spending time upon, mending can seem to take more time than it is worth. Today, only objects that have great economic or emotional value are ones that are most typically mended. This assignment asks you to engage with mending and to consider it an act that actually adds value (personal or otherwise) to a textile object.

For this assignment, you are to mend one (or more) textiles or articles of clothing so that the mended area creates a new visual impact. Choose a textile item or article of clothing that could be improved upon through mending. Mend your textile piece in a way that brings a new visual element to the textile. This can be subtle, bold, delicate, strong, highly visible, almost invisible, and more. It can bring a new design into the textile or slightly alter the design already there.  It could tell a narrative through the design. We will learn three useful ways of mending: darning, patching, and embroidery/stitches. You are welcome to apply these techniques or others you have discovered. (If you are changing the size of an article of clothing, please talk with Olivia individually about how to approach this)

Common reparative mending: holes, tears, seams falling apart, tattered edges, stains, or other damaged areas. Other kinds of additive mends: adding a pocket, adding a stitched design, changing the length of an item, changing the width of an item, or some other change to an article that is otherwise whole.

A few questions to consider:

• What makes this textile important to you?
• If it’s not important to you, how could your mending attention improve your textile and add interest?
• What is your emotional relationship to the textile? Could this be expressed through your use of mending stitches or patches?
• Is there a history to the textile that you are preserving? How does that affect how you want to mend this item?

Please read the following texts:

• Maintenance and Care by Shannon Mattern
• Repair Manifesto
• Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading by Eve Sedgwick

Documentation

• Documentation is due within one week after the assignment due date above.
• Upload your documentation to the Gallery section of the class website. Here are instructions on How to Submit Your Project to the Gallery.
• Your documentation should include:
  • a paragraph outlining your explorations: your process, discoveries, successes, challenges.
  • photographs or short videos of your objects (Please embed the video so it can be directly viewed; you may either upload an MP4 file to our server or use supported third-party hosting, such as Vimeo or Youtube, etc.)

Assessment

Points for this project will be divided amongst the following criteria:

EXPERIMENTATION/ RISK-TAKING/ INVENTIVENESS: The maker’s willingness to take risks (in composition, formal choices, materials, ideas, and content) is evident. Also important is the maker’s openness to new ideas, chance occurrences, and feedback throughout the creative process.

EXECUTION: Decisions about materials used and the manner in which the work is constructed, fabricated, and composed are deliberate. The maker’s choices indicate an awareness of how formal issues, materials and processes contribute to the interpretation or experience of the work.

DOCUMENTATION: Documentation well represents the works. It is clear, focused, and without extra elements that distract from experiencing the work. It includes both written reflection and photographic or video elements. Photographs are large enough for us to easily view the works.

Create a proposal for a structure and wearable that takes on the theme of Community Care during the time of Covid-19. The designs will be to care for us in ways that we most need at this moment. This can include ideas that are practical, spiritual, aspirational, fantastic, surreal, and more. You will be paired with one other student in class.

What are the needs that we as individuals have in order to survive and thrive? How can the structures and wearables give us both protection as well as hope? What would it look like if all of our needs were being met? What would be the collective response that you most hope for? What would utopia look like at this time?

Turn in Proposal Here:

Google Drive folder for all Designs for Community Care proposals and supporting documents.

Excellent Reading:

Feeling overwhelmed? How art can help in an emergency by Olivia Laing

Elements of your proposal:

1. Organized Google Folder of all drawings, sketches, research, brainstorming, and notes from your team meetings. Take turns being a note-taker at all of your team meetings.
2. Drawings (by-hand and/or on computer) image(s) of proposed environment and wearable. Please give us drawings that will help us understand the experience.
3. Written description of idea and concept (1-3 paragraphs).

“Doppelgänger: (German “double walker”) is a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune. In modern vernacular, the word has come to refer to any double or look-alike of a person.” (Wikipedia.org)

Recreating an everyday object out of new materials, such as fabric, changes our experience of that object. In this assignment we are going to explore this potential. How does the new weight or texture change our understanding of the object? How does the particular fabric change it? How does our interaction change?

Select an object from your life that you will replicate in cloth. Using the pattern-making skills and sewing construction techniques we’ve learned in class, make a textile doppelgänger of your object. We will use time in class to begin the patterning work. Choose an item that is not too simple (a piece of chalk) and not too complex (an inline skate).

You can make your doppelgänger the same size, smaller or larger. Shifts in scale must be attended to—if you are re-creating an object in at a tiny scale, you must hand-sew in the small details. On the other hand, if you are going large, remember to scale up all materials—thread might become rope when sewing a large sculpture.

Come prepared to share your Doppelgänger with the class.

Documentation

• Documentation is due within one week after the assignment due date above.
• Upload your documentation to the Gallery section of the class website. Here are instructions on How to Submit Your Project to the Gallery.
• Your documentation should include:
  • a paragraph outlining your explorations: your process, discoveries, successes, challenges.
  • photographs or short videos of your objects (Please embed the video so it can be directly viewed; you may either upload an MP4 file to our server or use supported third-party hosting, such as Vimeo or Youtube, etc.)

Assessment

Points for this project will be divided amongst the following criteria:

CONCEPTUAL RIGOR/ CONTENT: The maker develops works that pose questions, are informed by deliberate content, and critically engage viewers beyond the aesthetic realm. Maker demonstrates awareness of their work’s existence within the contexts of culture, history of the field, and critical theory.

EXPERIMENTATION/ RISK-TAKING/ INVENTIVENESS: The maker’s willingness to take risks (in composition, formal choices, materials, ideas, and content) is evident. Also important is the maker’s openness to new ideas, chance occurrences, and feedback throughout the creative process.

EXECUTION: Decisions about materials used and the manner in which the work is constructed, fabricated, and composed are deliberate. The maker’s choices indicate an awareness of how formal issues, materials and processes contribute to the interpretation or experience of the work.

DOCUMENTATION: Documentation well represents the works. It is clear, focused, and without extra elements that distract from experiencing the work. It includes both written reflection and photographic or video elements. Photographs are large enough for us to easily view the works.

Due: Mon., Feb. 24

For this assignment you will work with a partner to create an inflatable that alters our experience of a space within the library. You and your partner will use your objects from Part 1 of the Push/Pull assignment as studies for creating an inflatable sculpture and installation. Your sculpture will be based upon combining two or more of you and your partner’s Push/Pull objects and enlarging them.

Steps for this assignment, you and your partner will:

1. share your objects with each other and talk about what is exciting about the potential in combining some of your objects.
2. select a space in the library where you will install your sculpture for our critique. *
3. select two or more of your objects to combine to create an inflatable sculptural installation. This new inflatable sculpture should be customized to the space you have selected.
4. create your inflatable by enlarging the pattern pieces and sewing them together. Your enlargement needs to be at least a scale of 1 inch to 6 inches.
5. add an air tube to your inflatable so that a fan can inflate your new shape. Where is the best location on your inflatable to place the air tube? Remember to also find out where the nearest outlet is at your installation location so you can plan where the fan will need to be.
6. modify your inflatable so that it is customized to the space you have selected by trying it out in the space, observing it, and making changes that you think will enhance our experience of the space. The inflatable will behave differently than the original stuffed object. Once you have made the inflatable ask yourself, “what is interesting to me/us about the inflatable version? what alterations can I/we make to emphasize these new elements?”
7. prepare to share it with the class by rehearsing your setup. Each team will set up their inflatable right before we see it for critique. To make this go smoothly, each team needs to practice setting up their installation in a short amount of time.

* Notes about selecting a space in the library:

• Your inflatable cannot impede exits or entrances of the library. Nor should your inflatable block elevators and/or stairwells. Passersby need safe and accessible ways through the library. You can, though, alter a space that is away from main hallways, exits, entrances, stairs or elevators.
• Please be quiet when you are testing out your inflatable piece so as not to disturb people studying.
• Make sure your inflatable does not damage any books, structures, artworks, furniture, people(!) etc. in the library.
• Test out your inflatable in our classroom before testing it out in another space.
• When in doubt, ask Olivia or Miranda.

Materials

You will be provided with ripstop nylon to use for this assignment. Please be cognizant of not wasting material as you cut out your pattern pieces – it is our shared resource and will also be used for future assignments.

Some ideas to consider:

• How does the change in scale affect your choices in color or surface pattern?
• How will the installation your inflatable affect our experience of of the shape and also of the space?
• Are there changes to the patterns that you envision for the larger version?
• Lighting can also be a fun element to play with for the inflatables.

Design Parameters:

• Use mainly white ripstop nylon (which we have the most of).
• Use up to 1 yard of 1 other color (not white), but no more.

Come prepared to share your inflatables with the class for critique.

Documentation

• Documentation is due within one week after the assignment due date above.
• Upload your documentation to the Gallery section of the class website. Here are instructions on How to Submit Your Project to the Gallery.
• Your documentation should include:
  • a paragraph outlining your explorations: your process, discoveries, successes, challenges.
  • photographs or short videos of your objects (Please embed the video so it can be directly viewed; you may either upload an MP4 file to our server or use supported third-party hosting, such as Vimeo or Youtube, etc.)

Assessment

Points for this project will be divided amongst the following criteria:

PRESENTATION / INSTALLATION: The project demonstrates the maker’s careful consideration of the ways in which the work is installed/presented for critique (including site, location in space, relationship to the viewers).

EXPERIMENTATION/ RISK-TAKING/ INVENTIVENESS: The maker’s willingness to take risks (in composition, formal choices, materials, ideas, and content) is evident. Also important is the maker’s openness to new ideas, chance occurrences, and feedback throughout the creative process.

EXECUTION: Decisions about materials used and the manner in which the work is constructed, fabricated, and composed are deliberate. The maker’s choices indicate an awareness of how formal issues, materials and processes contribute to the interpretation or experience of the work.

COLLABORATION: The maker is an active collaborator in the project throughout the process. This includes, but is not limited to: responsive and open communication with collaborator, sharing in the tasks related to the project, actively listening and open to the ideas of their collaborator, contributes ideas to be considered for the project, open to suggestions, and follows through with what they have said they would do.

DOCUMENTATION: Documentation well represents the works. It is clear, focused, and without extra elements that distract from experiencing the work. It includes both written reflection and photographic or video elements. Photographs are large enough for us to easily view the works.

Basic primary forms can transform into expressive and complex shapes through a wide variety of physical manipulations. For our purposes, primary forms include spheres, cubes, cones, and cylinders. By exerting forces on the interior and/or exterior of the skin of the form, a whole world of new shapes, textures, and expressions open up: pushing, pulling, stretching, contracting, tucking, bursting, poking, creating tension and compression….

For this assignment, create three sewn primary forms that you will then transform into unusual, expressive, new forms. Begin by sewing the forms from the patterns given to you in class. Then experiment with manipulating each shape until you arrive at something you find interesting, expressive, and unexpected. Some ways of manipulating the form include, but are not limited to: binding with string, pinching with string and buttons, stretching with exterior strings, filling with unusual materials, piercing the shape, and so many more methods you will invent. You could also make extra primary forms and graft them together to create a new more complex shape. You should experiment until you find an expressive, interesting, and unexpected new form.

Come prepared to share your Push/Pull Objects with the class.

Documentation

• Documentation is due within one week after the assignment due date above.
• Upload your documentation to the Gallery section of the class website. Here are instructions on How to Submit Your Project to the Gallery.
• Your documentation should include:
  • a paragraph outlining your explorations: your process, discoveries, successes, challenges.
  • photographs or short videos of your objects (Please embed the video so it can be directly viewed; you may either upload an MP4 file to our server or use supported third-party hosting, such as Vimeo or Youtube, etc.)

Assessment

Points for this project will be divided amongst the following criteria:

EXPERIMENTATION/ RISK-TAKING/ INVENTIVENESS: The maker’s willingness to take risks (in composition, formal choices, materials, ideas, and content) is evident. Also important is the maker’s openness to new ideas, chance occurrences, and feedback throughout the creative process.

EXECUTION: Decisions about materials used and the manner in which the work is constructed, fabricated, and composed are deliberate. The maker’s choices indicate an awareness of how formal issues, materials and processes contribute to the interpretation or experience of the work.

DOCUMENTATION: Documentation well represents the works. It is clear, focused, and without extra elements that distract from experiencing the work. It includes both written reflection and photographic or video elements. Photographs are large enough for us to easily view the works.

Create a written list of 50 different ways you can transform a sewn sphere to create something new.

Upload to canvas.

Due: Wed., Jan. 22

Create five improvised, unusually shaped inflatables, each at least the size of your head. You are supplied with colorful plastic and tape for this project. You are also welcome to use your own plastic and tape. You are also supplied with straws in order to blow up the completed forms.

Allow the inflatables to be quirky, unusual, even strange. Experiment with the materials without knowing what the shape will become. Cut random shapes out of the plastic and then tape them together in a new order to see what happens. Cut the plastic into strips and curves, and then reassemble them in a new order to find a new shape.  What forms are created when you put a round shape and a straight shape together? What character or characteristics does the form begin to take on? Is there a verb for what the shape is doing? As you are making these intuitive shapes look for what amuses you or seems quirky, weird or unexpected.

At the core of this assignment is creating a form that is unusual and unexpected. Aim to surprise us next week in class with your shapes and discoveries. 

Come prepared to share your inflatables with the class.

Documentation

• Documentation is due within one week after the assignment due date above.
• Upload your documentation to the Gallery section of the class website. Here are instructions on How to Submit Your Project to the Gallery.
• Your documentation should include:
  • a paragraph outlining your explorations: your process, discoveries, successes, challenges.
  • photographs or short videos of your objects (Please embed the video so it can be directly viewed; you may either upload an MP4 file to our server or use supported third-party hosting, such as Vimeo or Youtube, etc.)

Assessment

Points for this project will be divided amongst the following criteria:

EXPERIMENTATION/ RISK-TAKING/ INVENTIVENESS: The maker’s willingness to take risks (in composition, formal choices, materials, ideas, and content) is evident. Also important is the maker’s openness to new ideas, chance occurrences, and feedback throughout the creative process.

EXECUTION: Decisions about materials used and the manner in which the work is constructed, fabricated, and composed are deliberate. The maker’s choices indicate an awareness of how formal issues, materials and processes contribute to the interpretation or experience of the work.

DOCUMENTATION: Documentation well represents the works. It is clear, focused, and without extra elements that distract from experiencing the work. It includes both written reflection and photographic or video elements. Photographs are large enough for us to easily view the works.