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When creating my habitat I wanted to play with the relationship of the inhabitants and the habitat itself, and how the latter can be shaped by the former. While designing this I was imagining the “habitat” of a renaissance woman. Everything is dark and barren as she lives hidden away in a cave among a mountain range representing her solitude. The lattice and shard looking pieces are meant to symbolize her presence, her thought, her work. Inside the cave is cluttered where she spends her time, she looks around her and there is only this big mess of all her projects and studies. Then outside the cave reaches a much more organized beautiful arrangement of her presence. But it reaches out into blackness, disconnected from everything, representing the futility of her efforts.

Unfortunately the project is not complete but I had fun experimenting with acrylic.

 As I was working on the birds late at night, I realized, only the birds can save me.

-9/23/2013

Motherhood changes everything. My house serves as an exaggerated example of what happens to one’s life when preferences and best intentions are sacrificed and what is left shows a person’s top priorities. My room is a wreck. My house is a wreck. But when I step into my daughter’s room the mess feels lighter and my nagging thoughts and “to-dos” can fade away, letting a sense of whimsy surface.

This created landscape serves to represent the stark contrast between rooms in my house. A grim, overloaded view of my bedroom trickles into a bright, colorful glimpse of the space I keep for my daughter. My bed is unkempt and my dresser left agape. Miscellaneous items ranging from shoes to coffee mugs are scattered around the base of the bed, leaving only a narrow path to enter and exit the bed. The clutter makes way to a different kind of mess. Splashes of color cover the floor and furniture of my daughter’s room, representing the youth and creativity felt when in the presence of small children.

There are 135 pieces total in this scene, 115 in my room, and 20 in my daughter’s. My pre-pregnancy weight was 135 lbs; I lost 20 lbs after giving birth; and I am left at 115 lbs. Each small object in the rooms come in multiples of three. Three is a pretty wonderful number aesthetically, but it is also representative of the number of people that make up my family. More importantly, three is the number of comfort dolls I bought for my daughter before she was born. I heard that children get upset if they lose their favorite toy, so it is best to have an extra — I bought two extras to be prepared. We now have three “Boo”s (tiny monster dolls) in my house so my daughter never gets lonely.

My choice of materials brings the viewer back to a sense of sacrifice: cereal boxes and frozen dinner boxes are used for the boards, and old bras that no longer fit my changed body are used for the fabric. I have given up my intentions to make fresh, home cooked meals for my family, leaving me with a near endless supply of food packaging. My body has changed so drastically that I feel I will never go back to my old shape, thus those bras become useless to me.

The choice of a white background gives the audience a surreal sense of focus on the items in this landscape. The christmas lights in the back create a common thread throughout the piece, contributing to additional spontaneity to my daughter’s room while contributing even more clutter in my room. Christmas lights lend themselves to a feeling of home and family, and they are also the primary source of lighting in my low-budget home.

I wanted to share my feelings of frustration and confusion with what certain aspects of my environment and routine have become, but I also wanted to take them on the reprieve I get when playing with my 10-month-old daughter, who brings a new and fantastic sort of chaos to my life.

This landscape was inspired by this impromptu dance party that was held on Aug 12, 2013 on Manhattan Bridge. There are 6 musical notes (they resemble swans below the bridge) for the 600 people that were there. The soundwaves across the top of the bridge is the song “Rattle” by Bingo Players. Like most house music songs, “Rattle” has a BPM of 128. Above the bridge there is a excerpt from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 128”, the second of two musical sonnets. 128 is, also, the amount of program numbers in synthesizers.