35 | project update: design domain

Goal: Make 21 objects
Criteria: Has to fit within overarching theme of Order/Disorder, and within my research theme of Kids. All items have to be no larger than the size of your palm.

I had a consultation with Maisie Broadhead for this project, and she gave me one of the best advice I've ever gotten in terms of designing jewellery. She said "You don't have to be polite about this, it's okay to be brash." It worked really well for this project, I must say.

Here's the catalogue of items. They're meant to be able to be worn individually, or with a few of the items, or with all of the items. We had to write a bit about each item, so what I wrote about each item is the handwritten bits in the catalogue.

34 | project update: mapping the body

Everyone had to pick a body part through a pin the tail on the donkey method and I got the part just below the knee. We had to research that body part and make something wearable.

Fun fact: here is no name for that part of the body!

Anyway, I made a mermaid tail that is heavy and has spikes in the metal band, with the cloth bit being removable.

This came about when I read a story of a person stranded at sea who morphed into a dolphin, and a separate illustration of different kinds of mermaid tails. So I thought, why not make something that can help make the transitioning process of a human to a mermaid a little bit less painful (assuming it is painful). House (the American drama series) taught me that without the brain, there is no pain. So it is possible to inflict a sharper pain to distract the brain from the original pain. Thus, the spikes. The weight of the tail is just to train the person's core muscles in preparation for the massive amount of work it has to do to swim with a tail.

33 | project update: text in form

For this project, we had to design and create a wearable object with text as the central conceptual theme. We were advised to look at the historical and contemporary use and significance of text in jewellery.

I made a modular charm belt. Kind of something like a charm bracelet, but in the form of a utility belt of sorts. Everything is made of fondant and icing, and the idea is that it has to be consumed for the charm to work (you can share it with other people too). And once there is nothing left of the charm, it ceases to exist.

Here's the catalogue I made to document it.

32 | project update: 6x6

6x6 is about thinking through making. We started out with a folding 3 lines on paper, and basically, work from there. We could do anything, as long as the resulting 36 items were a mix of 3D and 2D objects, each fitting within 10cm by 10cm.

I folded, drew, coloured, arranged, and folded even more stuff, before deciding to make 36 images from 3D objects. So I guess I fulfilled the brief by having 3D and 2D stuff even though I presented in its 2D form.

017 | What is Jewellery?

I finally got access to the course community on my school portal! So yay for that. For our first project, we had to make 3 wearable items that were autobiographical. After crit, we had to wear them and be photographed. I was not anticipating that and didn't wear what I thought should have been worn underneath. Either way, I'll probably still do a shoot to document all the stuff. That'll either be in Singapore (if I can transport the head thing safely), or here in Glasgow, but a lot later, when it's a lot warmer.

But I guess it's not too bad. Here's the photo that they uploaded of me to the portal with all our work.

1. drop cloth cloak

2. necklace bib thing

3. flower head piece

014 | Cross School Course Part II

Might I also add that that drink I was holding in the last post about the project was the first alcoholic beverage I've had since I came here? So just to clarify, I'm not always drinking okay. Okay, moving on! This is my slightly 'small and not-messy-enough' journal (according to the tutor). Can you see that glimpse of the squishy floor tile? It's the silver square thing with black lines drawn on it. It makes a pretty good stress ball.

And this is some of the BTS (behind the scenes) of the very long process of this very short project. And they're mostly from the end of the project when we were actually making things and not discussing things.

And this is us:

Related links:

Part I of this post: final exhibition

Merchant City tour

013 | Cross School Course

I'm actually posting about the project! Yay for actually doing it. This is part I because this post is only about the final exhibition. Part II, which I will be doing and scheduling asap after this post (so I don't not do it), will show a bit of the process.

The Cross School Course (I keep saying Cross School Project but that's wrong. Anyway, it's CSC for short) is done by all the year 1 students from the different departments of the school. We're grouped into groups of about 6-7 people from different courses, and each group is assigned a location in Glasgow. We then have to talk about the future, specifically in relation to the assigned location. My group was assigned Merchant City. I have pictures from our site visit in another post.

We could do anything we wanted, as long as it could be presented within the given space in an exhibition at the end of the course. The given space happened to be a 70cm x 70cm table space. This is my group's submission. And as with most of my posts these days, they seem to come from snapchat. So please pardon the quality.

There's an iPod under the table playing voice messages that allude to the potential everyday problems of the people living there. It consists of:

• an iPad (imagine it's the base for projecting holographic images)
• wallpaper
• squishy floors with silver water in it (imagine walking on those!)
• a portrait painting of the home owners, and their skyline
• a map on the wall
• brochures with information about the space
• books (which are our journals)
• real flowers

Note: the cafeteria in school is a really (read: extraordinarily) bad place for an exhibition. There wasn't enough space, and the lighting was horrid. I think all of us being there was a fire hazard in itself.

There were a lot of cool stuff though! Here's some of them that I could actually take a picture/make a gif of. There were some that I couldn't even take a photo of without using the flash because it was too dark.

There was one that was pretty amazing. It was made of several layers of ice and they suspended it on string to the (upside down) table and it had stuff inside. So it was basically just melting throughout the exhibition. It looked seriously quite cool. But no pictures because it was too dark ):

And that's about all I have. Not a lot but at least still something! And here's us. Well, the girls of the group. I wasn't the only one holding alcohol in the picture okay. They just hid it a lot better than me. Also, the girl on my right is Scottish. And I picked up so much of the accent from her (it actually surprised me).