Stitchin Fingers

I created a page on here to get advice on lace making and share my pictures, get feedback etc. What a wonderful supportive community!!
here is my page----> CLICK HERE OK

fingors

I went back to fingers yesterday, oh how i heart jewellery now! it was my most hated subject in first year for the fact it required delicacy and patience. first year amanda was a dick (no offense).
The way the present jewellery there is just like a shop, nothing inventive at all but a lot of attention is paid to lighting and having clean plain spaces so that nothing detracts from the jewellery. I will need to do this in my hugely hug space and somehow make these tiny objects work on the huge white walls. I worry about people not seeing my work but lets be honest here do i REALLY care?

on the. chong, Liyen.

ch ch ch ch ch check it out------> liyenchong.com
This Auckland artist embroiders using her own hair. She went to art school in ChCH and it deals with issues she faced surrounding her cultural background, creating a new place for herself in NZ. I love the detail in her work, and that she stitches things many times to get them absolutely perfect. The skeleton she made stitched from her hair has her exact proportions. I think using a material like hair you have to have some element of self portraiture in it if it is your own. At first glance you can't tell that her work is made using human hair, i like that my work is not like this because i want to keep that feeling of abjection towards the hair as being of the body, cast off and rejected.

“I started using hair because it is an expression of language: the way you wear your hair says something about you; it’s filled with your DNA."-Liyen Chong SOURCE

Wunderkammer! ya!

A cabinet of curiosities is usually related to the collectors profession and contains exotic oddities aesthetically arranged, each piece has a story behind it. These miniature museums were an attempt to classify science and civilization while the world was still flat. A lot of these home-classifications were hybrids of science, religion and superstition that are defunct in terms of facts and artefacts from our history but still relevant for the imagination and thought processes that you can see ... artefacts of human thought and relationships, experience, I like to se what fascinated people hundreds of years ago, what they thought it related to, where it came from, their explanations and reasonings for it being there. Ok so Wunderkammer are really things that fascinate us and we oogle at them, as oppsed to a curiosity cabinet which seeks to analyse the mysteries of nature. It seems ridiculous that these cabinets could be thought of as scientific, fish head on rat body next to pig nose on cat face, next shelf; rocks and a piece of coral, all shaped like jesus and other religious figures, next shelf, 34 dead butterflies arranged like a flower. These cabinets attempted to collect, categorise and define things, looking for similarities and differences. go here! and read more about cabinets of curiosity and see some beautiful photographs of them.
It was pretty hip to be having one of these in the late 15th century, they usually contained little artifacts all related to a theme, the one below as you can see is crochet. and it rules.I think this cabinet belongs to this creative Genius at Wunderkammer, Jessica Polka. She makes crafty little things using crochet and other sewing sorts of things and they are all awesome! especially the mustaches.
examining, collecting, cataloguing well there goes a use for the old library catalogues. Im sure that word has a U in it??? Victorian Gilt is one GIANT (a BFG scale giant) cabinet of curiosities. Being a pre-cursor to museums a Wunderkammer would compliment my work, making an heirloom out of my hair a-la victorian hair jewellery to remember the dead ones when i'm not dead yet or even old for that matter. It would be cool to display my little artefacts of myself in one of these, you would still need a magnifying glass though :( This method of presentation is something i think i would excell at because my bedroom/house is full of little strange objects and pictures that are arranged just so, these just really resonate with me :)

Célio Braga

'Célio Braga does not make jewellery. He observes people and their interaction and gives a reaction through the objects he creates. Those pieces can sometimes be worn as a brooch or a necklace. Truly applied art: the object that poses questions and hands you suggestions can accompany you all day. As a recollection, a confrontation or an act of wilfulness.'-Ward Schrijver [source]

Sorry I'm not allowed to download his images but if you click the link above you can view them or see his website here. Unlike most of the other artist that use hair i have come across his use leaves the hair looking very messy and hairy, very visceral. His work deals with the fragility, mortality and vulnerability (same thing amanda same thiiiing) of the human body so materials that are discarded like hair really compliment this idea.
He has some photography work which has been cut back in to and looks like reptile skin rather than human, the photographs are ECU and have the same translucent greyish look that hair has when viewed close up, you know like vermicelli?? I love this guys work, love the artists he references, his materials, his objects, everything :)

Jenny Hart

Oh Unicorn
9" x 9", 2005
hair embroidered on leather

These are single strands of human hair (artist's own) embroidered on soft leather.

Jenny Hart makes embroidery look so cool, not that it was ever un-cool, not since i took it up anyway. She is the founder of the Sublime Stitching website which was launched in 2001 and with its cutesy slick un-granny fanny like design who wouldn't want to stick a needle in something. stick stick stick. She describes making the above piece with hair 'like embroidering with air', i know exactly what she means, you can't see or feel it until it breaks then its squinting over your creation trying to find the loose end. She is a fan of embroidery that serves no function other than to embelish which is what my work is doing, well mine is art so it was never going to serve a purpose hmm. The juxtaposition of human and animal materials is awesome but something i wouldn't do myself because I don't believe I can justify using animal products in my work, even found leather although i did plan to use a pair of leather boots earlier this year but the lame tattooist never got back to me. puck you. i think i will still make that work at some stage i just need to think about where i'm sourcing the material from because its kinda sorta permanent...

"La Llorona" ©2005 Jenny Hart

Her website is HERE!

Mona Hatoum again...

"Keffieh," by Mona Hatoum, (1993-99), human hair on cotton, 1993-1999, collection Peter Norton, Santa Monica

Mona Hatoum uses Human hair as well as images and footage of her own body in her work. In the above piece she has interwoven pieces of women's hair into a traditional Arab head scarf worn only by males. Issues of gender and suppression surround this piece. There is something beautiful and at the same time grotesque about wearing the hair of another human as decoration and I find this object quite unsettling and repulsive. The use of hair makes the work quite intimate and is a familiar thing as we all have it although it shifts to being uncomfortable when taken out of context and removed from our bodies.

"The macho style is an externalized response to the powers of domination; but it is also a form of domination turned inward, within the community poised against the presence of women, whose voices are either repressed, or sublimated in the cause of struggle. Hatoum's feminized headscarf reveals this disavowal of the place of women and re-inserts their point of view through the embroidered strands of hair that hang loose beyond the boundary, breaking the pictorial grid of the material in the process of redefining the symbolic surface of political struggle." source

A series of etchings called 'Hair, there and everywhere' are collections of hair which look as though some have been arranged into patterns and others just laid there. You can make out images yourself and imagine what creates could be hiding amongst the interweaving curling lines but you can't quite tell if she had intentionally made images amongst the hair.This work is very intense and involves a lot of human hair, I would love to know who it belonged to and how she obtained it because this has a lot of implications. I like to think that it is her own, that in a way she suffered for her art and what she believes in, putting a part of herself into the work. This seems to have been the case with previous works such as 'Corps étranger' (1994). I love the format of the video in this work, the close up shots and the feeling of grotesqueness and ‘Deep Throat’ (1996), installations that use endoscopic journys through the interior landscape of the artist’s own body.

This work also used leather and beeswax, materials from animals in conjunction with human derived material. The leather is durable, the human hair seems fragile, not holding the suitcases together, awkwardly fumbling across the gap.This work 'Van Gogh's Back' (1995) is very light hearted and fun. It reminds me of playing in the bath with shampoo in my hair and making fun shapes. I love her different uses of hair and the Human body, all of them have vastly different effects on me weather that be repulsion, fascination or just very thought provoking.