Thinking about my final project
My preposal:
Analyzing my research thus far, I have noticed that among the common threads of women in my family—and most families—is the skill of cooking and idea of nourishment. The stereotype of women belonging in the kitchen has distracted from the importance and deep significance of sustaining life through prepared food.
For my final project, I plan to rethink the common perception of a woman’s role and try to uncover the immense value behind something that has so much been taken for granted/ expected of women. I have chosen to explore this issue through baking. I will create unique “cake sculptures” that represent the traditional roles of women, but I will do so in a way that also pushes those who devour the sculptures to dig deeper! I will do further research to understand more clearly the part that nourishment plays in a woman’s life, and the importance it has held within my lineage. I desire to explore the connections between nourishment and other qualities of women in my family. The recipes for my cakes will be those obtained from my family members.
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Since then, I've been talking with people about my topic and am now starting to gather ideas for how this project will really take form. I spoke with my advisor, Christine Armstrong, about my interest in art, and how I was concerned about it conflicting with my desire to obtain a degree in pastry arts after Denison, and how I truly dream of becoming a pastry chef in France. She assured me I can certainly combine the areas of art, food and french culture. In fact, in one of her French classes the students chose to study food art, and prepared crepes in an artistic way. It was a very encouraging talk, and afterwards I google searched food sculpture, and the first website I discovered was pretty interesting. Here are some pictures I took from
http://sickflash.com/food_art.html
Paris' Persuasion and Timmy's Tumble
My topic being feminism, Christy's being childhood and Sarah's memory, we had to create characters representing our topics and create a situation in which they interacted. I chose Paris Hilton because I feel she is the representative of a lifestyle of young girls that is growing in popularity. Though most people are understandably disgusted by her, it is funny how many growing girls are shaping themselves into something resembling Paris. She's a symbol of what is nowadays perceived as desirable and fun.
Our scene that we created out of our sculpted wax figures consisted of a child named Timmy being interrupted from his time of imagination by Paris Hilton. Timmy and Christy's octopus cowboy of Timmy's imagination are hanging from the ceiling, swinging and playing, with Raffe music playing. Paris enters, dragging along with her my piece from the previous project (the face with the makeup connected), and the music switches to one of her trashy songs. She lures Timmy out of his state of imagination, cutting him down from mid-air while managing to make a pass at the octopus... it was quite an experience acting as I thought Paris would. As Timmy falls he knocks down one of the children's pictures on the wall of his bedroom, and on the other side is a revealing picture of Paris. Paris departs with Timmy for a party, asking him if he can say, "that's hot."
I've never performed like that before, incorporating my art with puppets, music, acting and impersonation. It certainly helped to prepare me for the spectacle last Thursday. I was pleased with the reaction of my class, which was a lot of laughter. I feel like the plot was quite typical, but touches such as having Timmy and his imaginary friend floating around in the sky and getting cut down by Paris, and knocking down his picture revealed something beyond the surface interpretation.
We created a video from the footage of our performance. Christy, Sarah and I intermingled scenes from the performance with pictures of children's art and of Paris Hilton. We attempted to do so in a clever way, such as flashing to a picture of Paris mostly naked, wearing a cowboy hat after the imagainary octopus' declaration that "I'm a cowboy!" Timmy states, "I'm Timmy, and this is my imagination!" and we then insert a picture of Paris dressed very provocatively. I'd never made a video before, so it was such a foreign experience to me but I liked it, nevertheless.
Spiral Q: Art=Action
I'd say at least 30 people were a part of the environmentally conscious spectacle today on campus, led by Spiral Q. My art class has been working with them since they came to us from Philadelphia last week, and we've been through the process of deciding which issue to protest, how it will take form, and then actually creating the giant puppets for the spectacle. Today I wore a 2 foot long cigarette butt attached to my butt, and I fought the plastic bottles to try to get into the trash can, yelling at them that they belonged in the recycling and I in the trash. We had giant broccoli with passports and sickly, non-organic carrots and other wheezing vegetables. There was a 10 foot earth with a thermometer in it's mouth signifying global warning. Oh, and we had people moving around gloomily with black flags chanting, "Caarrrbon, Caaaarrrrbon...." It was a very sad scene until the giant administrator puppet came and turned the light switch off and the solar panel on, and then our scene basically turned into a fantastic dance party with our drummers energizing the crowd, people chanting and parading and waving enormous flags.
I had a spectacular time being a part of such a spectacle, it really had a lot of meaning and power to it. One of the people we gathered from the dining hall described the music as powerful. Another person was telling me how he would like to use the caged egg costume for his activism group striving for cage-free eggs. The spectacle definetly attracted a decent sized crowd, and I hope there is some kind of aftermath to the event. I really feel like this should become a yearly thing--or even more often.
