It's Degree Show Time Again!

Come one come all, if you're in Dundee it's free!

My work will be at the Dalhousie building as of Friday! But Assessments tomorrow so keep your fingers crossed!

Good Luck to all the Masters students! x

Strangled by Words

Made of laser cut suede, these scarves come in black, grey & white, upper case, lowercase and numerical and could be a good way to made distortions into something tangible.

Designed by The Little Factory.com

(I want one!)

Fashionable Fads?

So in my desire to make anything resembling jewellery I took the results from my Fashion Fads questionnaire and made them into a necklace. This is actually a mock-up because the photos I took of it did not turn out very well. Which was a shame, but my photoshopping skills aren't too bad so I'm actually really happy with this picture.

The idea was that they would go in order of popularity and repeated mention, except I dropped them all and wanted to go to my bed, so in the end it was just what went together. Once I get some more results I'll redo the necklace in another form - this year I seem to be all about the iteration and reiteration.

Anyway so for the trends showed:

- bracelets

- bright colours

- multiples & layers

- alternative meaning (friendship, causes & karma)

- alternative fastenings (eg: magnets)

...nothing I couldn't have already told you, but it's reassuring that I'm not completely out of touch and indeed scary at the number of trends I remember and actually participated in.

The shame!

Ridiculous...

Possibly the most ridiculous glasses related invention I've ever seen and this is coming from someone who hates having her picture taken.

Pressures of Memory...

"...investingating where one surface ends and another begins, the bloom of adornment, and how shifting exteriors reveal as they conceal." - Ariana Page Russell

I am in love with this image by Ariana Page Russell. It reminds me of all those scrawled messages that are written onto your hands so you don't forget them. But before you have a chance to remember they're even there, they've been washed off or smudged beyond recognition. Plus, whenever there's a not on your hand there's always someone who comments on how bad it is for your health, but there never stops us, within hours we've forgotten that warning and scrawled something new on our hands. But when I saw this picture I thought of it as all those messages making a permanent impression on the skin of all those things you've forgotten..."a body becomes an index of passing time."

It would be handy given my poor short term memory.

Style...

I love this graphic, I don't even know where I found it which is a little unfortunate as I can't cite it, however it does point out something (using specs) which I've been looking at in my research, the idea that styles come, go and sometimes come back with a loud groan until it comes to become the norm. What I currently find scary is that at 24 the fashions that I remember from the 90's are back. For example: leggings!

Aren't you glad there's no such thing as mind control...

These are the glasses I've been designing...fetching no? Although to be fair Jumi and Sun* both look far too cool in them. They're made of laser cut cardboard and are supposed to make people feel a little silly and instead Sun*, Jumi and my sister have all requested pairs!

The glasses are part of my cultural probe which I should get back this week as my participants have had their three weeks to work on them and I'm hoping that they will have gained me the information I've been looking for. They're supposed to create a conversation between me and my participants- the importance of appearance, image and how glasses with coloured lenses for the treatement of visual stress disorders intrupts the flow and stops people wanting to wear them. Or that's the theory.

Anyway, I love this photo of Jumi and I thought I'd share it. She looks like an evil genius!

(re)presentation

Yesterday morning prior to my Bowler Hats with Sleeves lecture I dropped into Border looking for a birthday card for a friend. Needless to say I didn't get a card, but I did come across a cultural research probe.

Down the main stairwell of the Dundee branch of Borders there is currently a small exhibition of photographs being displayed (2nd-31st October) called '(Re)presentation' which portray's two images of seven members of the branches staff and asks the public to pick the correct tribal grouping for the staff member. I think of social groupings such as goth, girly, geek, scene, trendy, sporty etc as tribes on the basis of a Talk to Frank study on the social groupings of school children which I studied as part of my undergraduate dissertation last year. This exhibition asks a similiar question to my dissertation study on personal appearance with tag lines of 'What is self image to you?', 'image maker, image taker' and 'fake doesn't make friends' and I am really quite intreged by this social experiment. Image is so important, yet entirely subjective.

My intent is to return to the exhibition and look at it properly, plus, since Rhiannon - in the 3rd year class I work with - works there, I'm going to ask her about the exhibit and see what she knows about.

I'll try and get some sort of image to add to this post when I get along there again.