College Project - Tumblr Posts
It’s a major holiday, that means coming to visit you and your sister. Grandma and Great Aunt.
Sometimes I wonder if it’ll be any different, if you would've had an unexpected shift in views in the months since the prior visit. You won’t. But there’s always that naive twinge of hope in the back of my mind.
We always have dinner at your house on visiting days, once the day we arrive, then the next day before taking our leave.
It wouldn’t matter where we’d eat, both the front room and kitchen had a TV.
That’s where the topic would be brought up. It could be a political advertisement for a candidate, or even simply a medical commercial using gender-neutral language.
“Why don’t they just say women?! Nobody else can get pregnant, no matter what the left says. Can’t even say women anymore.”
My sister would gently correct you. ‘Not all women can get pregnant.’ ‘Not all pregnant people are women.’ You’d get all huffy. ‘The gays don’t want children to call their parents mommy or daddy anymore. They’re letting children mutilate themselves in schools. Sinners, the lot of them, destined to burn eternally.’
She stays quiet in response. She knows there’s no arguing with you. You won’t listen, won’t hear out any other view. But she’ll subtly look towards me with almost unnoticeable sympathy laced in her expression. She knows my plight, the secret only she in the family knows.
Two parts of me, what I can’t control, has been condemned by you. Flesh and blood. This isn’t the first time, far from it. But the hurt felt never lessens. You don’t know. No inkling crosses your mind. The heat sent from you burns into me, unforgiving and painful.
Would you change your mind if you knew? Would the knowledge that your own grandchild, your own DNA, didn’t feel like a girl, never connected with it? Liked people other than men? Would it change anything?
Or would you continue on, purposely directing your stinging words at me?
Would you think me a monster? A sinful predator, no longer human in your eyes?
Would you still love me as family?
I’m used to being outcasted. But I don’t think I could take it from close family.
You’ve been different too. So I just don’t understand how you think this way. Teen pregnancy and being mentally ill in the late 19th century? Wasn’t easy. You know this. You’ve experienced it. The multitude of personal problems and social stigmas you dealt with as a teenage mother. The stigma that depression brought. Not being understood as a serious problem, being told to ‘suck it up’ and to stop feeling sorry for yourself. You couldn’t control either of these. You should know the crushing feeling of otherness.
I know that same feeling of crushedness. Your comments, hate towards people who aren’t straight, don’t fit into the societal view of gender, it all hurts. And it will continue to hurt, even if you don’t know who you’re hurting.
Everyone is human, regardless of gender, sexuality, or anything else. And it hurts when anybody is treated less than for something they can’t control, how they were born.
Will I ever tell you this? Express the hurt I’ve experienced at your metaphorical hands?
No. I won’t.
That’s why I write this. This unsent letter. In a last ditch, naive hope, that you will change. Change to be more accepting.
For now though, I will remain quiet and take the brunt. Maybe, when I’m not so scared of your reaction, rejection, maybe I’ll tell you.
Some Sketch book stuff from my Radius Project.
Originally wanted to focus on the shapes of Arthurs Quay: the lines of the trees and the buildings, the light poles and fence, the cranes working on the opera house peaking over the Arthur's Quay building. The circles of the park itself: a "Radius" project on Radiuses was very funny to me.
I eventually got drawn to a different subject though: The heron who lives by the old rowing house. I talk about him in more detail in a different post
Here he is, my muse: Arthur the Heron (or Artie, if you'd like). He can be seen along the Shannon, but he's typically posted up by the old rowing club, or perched on a rock in the river when the river's low.
There's something about Arthur that just captivated me. I love animals and i have a particular soft spot for water birds. I think there's a lot to love about the heron: symbolising nobility and stoicism, standing tall and proud, like a statue above the water, waiting, scanning- and then. striking its prey with lethal quick precision!
But on the other hand, the Heron is a deeply silly animal. Look at how it moves, how it sort of has to fold in an itself. They make infamously silly noises, Kranks and Gogogos and ooooos.
I have a more personal connection to the Heron: for a while, my ma swore she was being stalked by a heron. Every bridge within 20km of our house had the same heron posted on it. On the way home from school in Carlow, on the drive to our favourite restaurant in Castle Dermot, sitting atop Cromabu as we drive through Athy. He disappeared with the pandemic.
I think more than that, the heron reminds me of home, and how far away I am. The Shannon reminds me of my own river Barrow. Herons have colonies, "sieges" where they can group together when mating season rolls around, or when they're "off duty" but other than that, they're largely solitary, largely alone.
Working With Mixed Materials in 3D
[7-10-24 - 12-10-24]
This workshop was a wonderful excuse to do exactly what I've wanted to do for this whole project: take things apart, see how they work, and put them back together in a new way. With the encouragement of my tutors, and a bag of used toys from the curio shop, I set about my task.
I found that I had a few guiding principles: I liked the movement of the toys, liked the use and function of it, so kept that as much as i could. I found in both my selection of toys, and my work that I was drawn to the more humanoid figures, intrigued by the idea of taking something familiar and "ruining" it. Conceptually, I like the idea of An Assembly of self, the idea that we all have to construct ourselves, and i think theres something grotesquely Divine about that, so i aimed to give my creations a sort of Angelic appearance, to create a host of Angels Of The Self.
This was sort of inspired by the myth of the managol, a filipinio vampire, a woman who separates at the waist. I wanted a sort of dangling thing, evocative of organs. i used ropes to try simulate that sinewy texture.
A baby doll with a halo if legs. Originally had big buff arms, but it liked it better crawling around on its halo. Cardboard wings help with a paper fasteners, based of a set of plastic toys wings i have that you'll see later
This toy is the same as the one used for the torso in my first creature. It had a set of two screws in the back, and i thought taking it apart would be as simple as unscrewing the screws. It was not. This thing was unreasonably hard to get apart, and this is as far as it would split, even with the screw drilled all the way through, even with my tutor chiselling her open. I though there was something evocative here, something about her head splitting and cracking while the rest if her holds resolute. I think I'd eventually like to to fill the crack with red wool and tinsel.
This is Gabriel, my chief angel, and my favourite. Through a use of carefully made holes and axels, Gabriel maintains the articulation of both his arms and his wings. He's made from a baby doll, and some detachable wings from might've once been an action figure.
As i was working, I tried to keep an eye out for Interesting patterns, shapes, connections, as inspired by the work of Hans Bellmer
Attended the Laser Cutting workshop today, and had a lot of fun!! As much as I enjoy working with my hands, I have to admit I feel very at ease working behind a computer screen. We made a little template snail in Adobe Illustrator, and then cut it out with the laser cutter.
