My Autobiographical Pattern – All Together, It Could Be A Cozy Sitting Space

The Value of Art can be in the Love of Making

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” Marc Chagall

Current pandemic restrictions have highlighted the extent of consumerism experience in modern society and allowed us a moment of pause to consider how we value of our material possessions. This project enhances the value of everyday objects and emphasizes the feelings of love for the making process by creatively repurposing older materials. The project is expressed as an installation of upcycled found objects, and Pop Art love-icon, stamp-printed, found textiles with commercial printing inks.

This installation will include the presence of the artist to emphasize the role of the maker’s hand in the process, and will be documented through photography in a suggested setting for the artwork to exist. The primary visual inspirations for the printing patters comes from Jim Dine’s ‘Heart’ sculptures outside the Montreal Museum of fine arts, and Robert Indiana’s ‘Love’ prints and sculptures. These ubiquitous icons open conversations on how we express our love and how we define art. I will continue this conversation through a lens of the Wabi-Sabi aesthetic guiding my making practice. 

The choice to include other forms of my art in the installation was inspired by the “bicycle” paintings by Canadian artist, Greg Curnoe. Specifically “the cut-out construction Self-Portrait with Galen on 1951 CCM, 1971, is the only one of these that includes a self-portrait and a portrait of his younger son, clearly showing the connection between Curnoe’s art and his everyday life.” (j. Rodger, 2016) 

This methodology will unwrap opportunities for embellishments on future up-cycling projects, thus contributing to my objective of offering creative opportunities that limit practices of over-consumption.