Windnie Pan

i'm glad i stayed in Florence this weekend. It gave my more time to think about my work since I decided on Tuesday that I wasn't going anywhere with my last project and basically wanted to start over. As wonderful and cheap as Tutto is, I realized that the materials I bought from there were not doing my work any justice. It started to look really crafty and too sweet. I also wanted to focus on a subject matter other than myself.

My initial idea was to choose a specific person or event...in the news or in the past... and make a portrait of them with found objects. I felt like I needed a concrete idea to start out with so that I would know exactly where I was going. The problem with that was that I'd have to be really lucky for my objects to magically match up with the person/event I wanted them to represent. Despite my frustration I took Julia's advice and went in search of objects on the streets anyway. While gathering my junk I felt like i was going to have to make up a fictional character to make a portrait of... but I really didn't want to. I went online and started to look at news articles since CNN is my homepage (but i dont read it much)... what better place to find stories. However I wasn't having much luck and just decided to keep looking for junk.

One night I was walking through San Lorenzo after the market had closed. There were trashbags everywhere and I was able to find little treasures that may have fallen out of them. The street cleaners were driving through as I was doing this and I found myself trying to beat them to these little objects (and got funny looks in the process). I began to think about how all of this "trash" has a history. They had a function at some point and then all of the sudden are being washed away to never be seen again. As I walked home I began to relate the little pieces of junk that I had picked up to the news articles I had just been looking at. There is this section on the CNN website with the most popular news articles... which get renewed every 20 minutes. It got me thinking about the constant cycling of news and how stories can be a big deal one day and then all of the sudden it gets replaced by a new, more interesting story. So that is what my project is about.

With that idea in mind I sat in the studio for hours trying to figure out how I was going to create a piece of work out of this idea. My frustration with working 3d and making installations was revived and I somehow ended up with a pile of junk wrapped in wire and a pile of grey ribbon I had cut down and written the top 10 news articles of a certain 20 minutes of that day on. The next morning I went to the Science museum for kicks although i probably should have been working and was attracted to this object (i honestly dont know what it is.. i just liked the way it looked) and thought i might be able to use it as a sort of inspiration. I feel like I'm finally getting somwhere.