Month: December 2020

19^th Dec

I was inspired by the damp note paper on the street. Their loose quality makes me feel a sense of lost and helpless, which shares the common feeling of homeless people. Based on this observation I decided to communicate the lost feeling through material experiment. Instead of communicating my subjective opinion on homeless. I am going to focus on explore the materiality of cardboard and paper engaging with the topic by making contrast on material’s colour and texture.

Broken mirror and glass bits and were collected from the street. They are direct material reference in responding to homeless. Soft wax is added around the glass bits. Creating a good contact with the cardboard base. making sure they will not fall off during the casting process.

 After the bronze pure, most of the glass bits came out nicely apart from one’s surface covered by bronze. During the polishing process I peel off the bronze cover and found the glass underneath. This experiment works well. It mixes glass and bronze together creates material contrast. Next time I will add an extra layer of wax on top of the glass.

I kept developing visual responses of homeless by making materials contrast. It is a good way brings homeless issue and jewellery together. I kept building on the idea of making surface contrast by making the bronze letters shinny and the rest part matt.

 The test piece inspired me with thoughts on putting cardboard with fine jewellery that contains precious stones. Two collages were made base on Dali’s sculptural fine jewellery as visual response to my thought. Dali’s works were chosen is because they combine sculptural forms and wearability together like my practice.

After I finished the collages, viewers think the visual contrast make them question about wealthy and poverty, which is beyond the homeless issue. I am supervised by this response and considered about developing my jewellery designs into a spiritual level rather than representing the homeless issue.

To investigate the spiritual level, I analysed other people’s interviews with homeless people in Canada and trying to understand different reasons for people become homeless. Throughout the research I realized that none of the cases share the common features. There are so many negative factors for people to become homeless. If I investigate each individual case, I may lose in this research without developing my project further. I decide to keep developing the homeless jewellery by keep experimenting with visual contrast and materiality.