visuallanguageeilidhtelfer

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10 FINAL IMAGES

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PROJECT EVALUATION

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PROJECT STATEMENT

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A Homemade Sickness - Final Piece

quilt on canvas, each piece of fabric representing an individual story of poor mental health, bound together with the same or similar thread, representing the solidarity and understanding, often friendship, between people suffering from mental illness. text included represents negative intrusive thoughts that are always present, even when everything looks good from the outside. I chose to make a quilt as a lead on from thinking about comfort items for mentally ill people and the support and comfort even safety they can provide.

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all developments hung ready for assessment! including pieces from workshops relevant to my project

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experimented with different quilting techniques, and different fabrics, threads and needle sizes, working out which style looked best and ended up selecting the canvas as it made sewing easier, i ran into challenges with the wooden frame getting in the way of stitching but used initiative and problem solving to figure out how to separate the canvas from the wood without affecting the actual structure of the canvas

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my choice to use quilts came inspired by a critical practice lecture, where there was mention of finding evidence of black womens art, and to do so having to look at quilts, ceramic pots, and darning for example because black women didn’t have access to art materials or any training in the subject.

all of my lecture notes can be found on my Critical Practice tumblr linked here: https://www.tumblr.com/critialpractiseeilidhtelfer

also located here is all of my artist research

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pinterest board used for visual research and inspiration, artist research is on tumblr which includes sources linked in these posts on Pinterest

Pinterest link: https://pin.it/54HsUtn5M

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experimenting with stitching patchwork into canvas, a small version of what i plan to be my final, also see the index of sewing patterned on the back of the canvas, even the practice of sewing itself leaves an index

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using the concepts i developed from the map workshop, i used the remaining half of the map to make a patchwork “sewn” collage, and hand wrote out responses from the survey into each section, then “stitched” it together with a red posca pen

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comfort item - teddy bears, often provide a sense of comfort and safety to struggling people, so came the idea of a quilted bear, its fur comprised of different stories represented by different patches

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creating my own quilt patterns digitally, making each square individual, to represent the varying struggles and stories of different people.

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using the responses from the form i created a chalkboard like collage using procreate, and sketched a bed overlaying it, representing one big quilt of stories, woven together with solidarity and understanding.

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had the idea to gather responses to a survey about the impact of mental health on a persons life, as i want to be able to talk about mental health issues in the literal sense, using real people’s stories and potentially printing them onto a quilt?

32 responses at present

survey link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUESWuhtMubrOwXfGeUwhD-wVbjfB5UOmdkfm9-aeovBC73g/viewform?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaYeKLjw4wDIZKRGaOLdfw4igi43kom-UL-irRDd7l6Z0gx7q-A5jzgxTP0_aem_d0wuWDb7Eu7JG9VCJMgzAA

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other sketches pertaining to bed rotting during depression, including a small paper patchwork with the text “we are not alone”

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thinking about Tracy Emin’s “my bed” lead me to thinking about the comfort of one’s bed during a time of depression, how safe it feels to simply rot under the covers, and how comfort items such an blankets and teddy bears, even pets can be such a comfort to someone struggling from poor mental health.

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thinking about index’s on the body, linked to mental health, for instance i keep multiple hair bobbles on my wrist as a preventative of a relapse in self harm, so while to others it will appear as convenience so i can tie my hair up, to me it is an index of my poor mental health.