Many small things

As I am nearing the one month anniversary of my rendezvous with London, I thought I'd share something I have noticed as being slightly odd and different.

Bananas taste really good here! This comes to mind first as I am typing this over dinner, which includes a banana. Actually, I can't decided if they really taste better, or just are on par with the fresh California fruit I am used to, whereas almost all other fruit here is pretty disappointing. The best apples are local ones, which at least are cheap. They are tiny, maybe tennis ball size and are really handy because they fit in a bag. However, I am craving a Golden Delicious right about now, because the apples are pitiful in comparison. I guess the same is true in Rhode Island, except the bananas are better here. Also, if you remember back to my pictures of my flat-mates and I holding cards, with our name, country, and favorite animal, my favorite animal was a Monkey. I have pretty much been eating one banana a day, and they all find it really amusing.

Props to Mary for decoding my subject for the semester (see last post). Here is our brief we were given in class on Monday:

"New Scientific discoveries and technologies have inspired designers to vew the natural world from new perspectives. the 1950's post WWII era, new exciting visual patterns and contemporary advances in science technologies enabled exciting unseen images to emerge. Genetic decoding and engineering, dissection, viral mapping, nuclear particle physics and bio-mimicry, Google earth and space exploration similarly continue to inspire artists and designers in the 21st century."

Our teacher advised us to stay away from flat resources (ie, photos) and to instead work from observation. This is to encourage us to discover new, different, exciting, and fresh patterns rather than simply pulling one straight from an inherently patterned source. This is almost always my instinctual way of going about a project because I HATE to draw. Drawing requires much more thought for me than writing a paper, reading a book, or listening to a song. It requires me to think about the object I'm attempting to represent, think about it's shape and the values that construct that shape. As much as I hate to draw, I know that it will lead me to ideas that are far more interesting and in the end original and successful.

Using the brief, I became interested with the word dissection. After being briefed by our tutor, I ran to Tesco and in search of some interesting veggies to rip apart. I quickly picked up a cabbage and lettuce. I saw some pomegranates and picked them up as well. When I got back to my room, I literally went at the cabbage with a spoon, carving away to created an interesting texture inside. I also ripped open the pomegranate and was instantly excited at the prospects of what I saw to draw inside.

So my project so far is to treat the innards of fruits and vegetables as my scientific discovery. Taking them out of context as fruit innards, I'm using the shape, form, and color from these areas and eventually transforming them into a stitch piece. I have a fairly intense magnifying lamp that I have been studying these subjects with, which brings in a bit more of the new age scientific theme into my project.