Mmmmm, paper!

Pretty dresses, pretty papers!

Dress Forms  -  25" x 37"

Last fall I started a new series to include in a group exhibit with 8 That Create held at the View Art Center in Old Forge NY. The theme of the show was "Off the Hanger" and I was inspired by fresh spring dresses (the piece I made to donate to Virginia Spiegel's fundraiser is another in this series). I was also inspired by some remarkable papers that I picked up at a local art supply store. Being a printmaker before coming to quilting and mixed media, my affinity for paper is strong and beautiful paper can make me positively swoon!

In the piece above, Dress Forms, I started with an ethereal paper that is embedded with thicker paper circles. The color of the wall behind the piece when hanging becomes part of the work, which is a really neat side effect. I constructed each of the dress shapes apart from the background and then attached them to it after. Some of the dresses are interesting papers themselves, two are of some gorgeous pojagi fabrics that I bought in Korea when I taught there. The texture and color of the fabric is delicious! The papers and fabrics of the dresses are altered with ink, paint and stitch, both hand and machine. The resulting piece is fairly delicate and would not travel well so I'll need to choose future venues for it carefully.

La Mode  -  12" x 12"

La Mode, above, also uses a pojagi fabric as the dress form, and it's mounted to another gorgeous paper. This one is more of a thick, cast paper, cast over spiral shapes. I tinted the paper itself with inks and paints to take it from the original white.

Frocks  -  5" x 7" each

Frocks uses the paper that I used for the background of La Mode as the dresses themselves. The backgrounds are various newspapers I've collected, painted and inked to give them color and contrast from the white dresses.

The dresses are attached to the background with an arch to them so they stand off the surface and are dimensional. I definitely have more ideas for this series and have found more papers with interesting textures to play with to execute them.

Are you ever so inspired by the materials you've chosen that the piece practically makes itself? Have you discovered any delicious papers lately?