Showing posts with label home. Show all posts
Showing posts with label home. Show all posts

Thursday, 7 May 2009

Family

Graphite in VAPD. "Dishes". Sorry about the glare :)

IMT: Family
I think that one of my favourite things to express in my art is gender roles and issues, specifically those involving women. And of course women face the issue of having a family, and then there is the problem of her role in the family.

I think that this is an attack on the ancient views of what a women should be: a beauty queen who can cook, clean, and will make babies and silently raise them - all without protest. Nothing more and nothing less. No thoughts, no opinions, no discussion. This image depicts the strong woman as she sees herself, but with the added voids that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers would have seen.

I completed this drawing about a week ago, but I feel it is very much appropriate for the theme of "Family".

Just for the record:
Personally, I have nothing against stay-at-home wives and mothers, so long as it was HER decision and she knows that she is able to do whatever she wants - without being ruled over by a dictatoral husband.

I'm actually rather pleased today because I received my school VAPD diary mark - which is a form of assessment - during today's art lesson. I got 93/100 :)

Thursday, 16 April 2009

Look out, tacky table!


Time for a makeover!

A 'quick' post first, just before I get into the nitty gritty of what I'm getting up to with art.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was very motivated to clean my room and thus completed a two-day intensive clean-out, disposing of fripperies and other junk. Basically, being quite a lazy young lady, and not having had a decent cleanout in quite a while my room was cluttered. Cluttered, cluttered, cluttered. But that was just the beginning.

I realised that in order for my room to keep clean and organised, I was required to dutifully discard of a lot of crap. From old school books that were no longer relevant to my current studies and nonsense school assignments from year six (I'm currently in year 11), to letters and clothes and other everyday items such as photoframes that I no longer used. Leather shoes was a biggie. I finally 'threw out' all my leather shoes after I had them sitting there, decaying under my bed as my veganism thrived almost a year now.

I didn't 'throw' them out really, but donated them to an op shop (thrift store), along with 2 garbage bags of clothing, accessories and novels in addition to the box full of a decent amount of leather and non-leather shoes. I recycled ALOT of paper and cardboard as well. I weighed them, aswell. The combined total of 2 garbage bags and 2 smaller shopping bags worth of paper-waste weighed in at just a little over 21kg (that's 46.3 lb for imperial system-ers).

For all my efforts my mum has promised me new furniture, as I've never really had decent, "goes-well-together" stuff, let alone anything that matches. I've had the same bedside drawers and chest since I was a baby. I'm 16 next month. Though I do acknowledge I'm lucky to even have what I do have.

This weekend we're going out to Domayne, and Freedom, and other furniture stores to just take a look around and what's currently "in". I'd like to down-grade to a king-single bed now too, as I've got no space whatsoever in my bedroom as my queen bed totally dominates all floor space. I'll be getting rid of an old computer that's no longer used on my desk, and then getting rid of that desk to so as I can have a nicer table-top to work on in my own room. A desk with drawers. I know it sounds kind of spoilt and totally consumerist, but I think it's fair.

BUT! I am doing something quite non-consumerist... I am "recycling" something else...


Ta-dah!

In the process of all that cleaning, I managed to clear the surface of this miniature op-shop-sourced, knee-high, cheap, wooden "coffee-table" - which wasn't actually used for that purpose - and realised just how tacky it was. My mum had let me use it when we moved house five years ago as I didn't have much furniture in my room.

This table-top gives the impression of a corkboard rather than a smooth surface.

This will be my first ever project of this kind: redecorating an old, nasty used piece of furniture.
In these photos I think you can see that it is rather daggy, but I think it has some potential to be quite beautiful. I rather like the shape and form of its legs, and this table truly has served me well. It deserves a new lease on life.