Mid-Term Project: Lady in Fabric

For my finished Mid-Term project I decided to continue with the concept of active art or art you can touch and move around. As someone who spends way too much time in fabric stores, I wanted to be able to include different fabrics and different textures so people can feel the art itself. although most of the fabric is quite loose so it can be moved around, certain corners of the fabric had to be glued down for stability. The girl behind the fabrics, in a photo, is me. I wanted to use myself as the model so I would have full control of the poses. The pouch I'm holding was also sewn by me and it includes little cut outs of images representing me, the pouch can be opened by the zipper attached. This work shows a lot of me because mainly it is a photo of me, I did all the embroidery, sewing, and gluing. The small cutouts in the pouch, give a small glimpse of the 'fun facts about me'. One artist who inspired me would be Laurie Heine, who does lots of patchwork art, some including dresses, which I thought were very impressive
One of the main reasons I decided to make this project using fabric, sewing, embroidery is because it has recently become a hobby of mine, that I try to keep up with. It's all something I learned when I was younger, either by myself or from watching my mother sew. I feel This project had a lot to do with my Portuguese side of the family, all the women before my mother were seamstress's, and had careers in the field. My mother although didn't make it a career of hers, she did learn on the sew for clothing and from her, my brother and I carried that information with us. My skills aren't as good as there's, for me it simply gives me something to do.