Women in Bloom

Last weekend, I hung out with friends and worked hard to get my seminar project finished, which was due on Tuesday. The prompt for the project had to do with wish fulfillment, and I immediately thought of my wishes for the world. There are several women that I’ve been researching lately that have done some amazing things for their communities and my wish for the project was to show other people these women and their beliefs and accomplishments. Originally, my plan was to create a band of superhero women and create a comic book, but that turned out to already be a thing! (It’s called Female Force. It’s awesome.) I decided to change my idea totally and make t shirts.

Malala Yousafzai Print
Malala Yousafzai Print

I started out with line drawings of a few women’s faces: Malala Yousafzai and Sempat Pal Devi. Malala is a Pakistani 16 year old student and education activist. She has been shot by the Taliban because of her activism for girls’ education in Pakistan and continues to speak out for what she believes. Sempat Pal Devi is the leader of the Gulabi Gang, which is a group of women in Northern India who wear all pink, carry big bamboo sticks, and stand up for the rights of women and victims of domestic abuse. I decided to combine these images with something that would connect the two women. I researched the official flowers of each of their provinces to put silhouetted behind the women’s faces. I decided on flowers because I think that they symbolize these women well: they can grow anywhere, they can flourish under difficult and seemingly impossibly conditions, and are beautiful all the while. I made a screen for each flower and each line drawing, then screenprinted the images onto t shirts. I’m happy with how my shirts turned out, and I’m hoping to start making them for my friends and anyone who wants one! I want to get the message of these women out and help their faces become well known, so I’m not going to charge for these shirts, I’m just asking that whoever wants one brings me a shirt to print on. If you’re interested in a shirt, comment on this post!

Malala and Sempat Pal Devi  shirts!
Malala and Sempat Pal Devi shirts!

Other than my shirts, I started a new painting this week and had a different project due in Contemporary Trends. We’ve been working with a concept called Augmented Reality, which can be accessed with a few different smart phone apps (Like Augment or Aurasma). The basic idea of it is that when you point your phone camera (with the app open) at a certain image or in a certain location, a new image or 3D animation will appear on your phone in the environment. This presents infinite opportunities for art; like sculptures, new architecture, and really anything that we could want to change in public places that wouldn’t be possible in reality. Last week, we brought in a few different ideas with our groups to present to the class. Then this week, we came to class with a presentation on how we would install our object into Augmented Reality. My group and I decided to edit the Irish Famine Memorial in downtown Boston, since there are issues and strange parts about it. We made a 3d model of the sculpture and multiplied part of it to accurately depict the ratio of people negatively affected by the famine. Doing a project in Augmented Reality was really challenging but very interesting, and I can definitely see the medium becoming really big in the future!

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