Finals

I did it. I completed my first semester of graduate school. It was touch and go there for a minute, but once I found my stride, I had great fun and allowed myself to embrace being a real artist. I took a Feltmaking class and an Independent Study. Feltmaking was pretty amazing-there's something kind of magical about taking a bunch of wool fluff and turning it into whatever you want. My class was given a full month to work on our felt final. While my midterm project was really different from what I normally do, my final was very much like the rest of my work in that the structure was very repetitive and some might describe the whole thing as obsessive. I can't help it. That's just the kind of thing I like to do.

Felt pods in process

To get started, I made over 100 felt pods. I constructed them by winding natural colored wool roving over ping pong balls and, after felting them and allowing them to dry, I cut them in half, thus forming two little bowl shapes. Once they were off the ping pong ball, I finished felting the pods and allowed them to dry. The way I describe making them sounds simple but, trust me, it took so long and my hands spent so much time submerged in hot water and soap that I thought all the skin on them would fall off. Seriously, the tips of my fingers were blistered.


After I finished felting all the pods, the next step was to sew them together. I sewed them by hand, of course. I thought the individual pieces would look more round once they were all connected, but they took on kind of a honeycomb shape, which I think ended up working really well.

The front and back, after pods were sewn together

The concave side of the piece was intended to hold many, unique miniature sculptures. I like working small,

Paper sculptures in process

so this was the perfect project for me. I used mostly paper to construct them, as well as thread, wood, metal, and adhesive, among other things. I'm really pleased with how the little sculptures came out, so I'll likely make more of them in the future. It's interesting the shapes you can make with just scraps and glue.

Once I finished making the paper sculptures, I inserted them into the base piece and glued them into place. For my final critique, I hung the piece from the ceiling with fishing line so that it appeared to hover in mid-air and people could walk around the piece to view both sides. I spent so much time putting all of this together, probably more time than I've ever spent on any individual project, that I was definitely short on sleep in that week leading up to final critique, but it was all worth it. And I'd like to thank my wonderful feltmaking teacher, the lovely Dena Gershon, for helping me through all of our projects. She's a patient and inspiring teacher and I feel lucky for having the opportunity to learn from her.

Inserting the paper sculptures

My independent study class was interesting because I was allowed to make pretty much whatever I felt like. Once I finished a piece, I got to present it to the other grad students. It was really helpful to get meaningful feedback from them and it's so nice to be back working in a community with other artists. I mostly stuck to working with paper for that class, as it's the medium I'm most interested in. While I was able to combine the paper with felt in my feltmaking class, the paper pretty much stood on its own for independent study. My favorite piece turned out to be a sort of net I made out of thread and strips of paper with hand drawn hash marks on them. The picture doesn't do it justice, but I'm sure there are many more iterations of this one to come.

I'm pleased to say that I'm a straight A student and I have a lot of great ideas to work on in the future. I'm on break for a few weeks now and, although I'm grateful for this much-needed time off, I'm actually already looking forward to next semester. I'm taking another independent study as well as an art history class on Dada and Surrealism. I hope I have as much enthusiasm and fun as I did this semester. It's weird how I planned on going to school for so long and now I'm already finished with one semester. When long-term plans become a reality it's kind of surreal. But here I am, doing what I love and moving ahead. I couldn't be happier.