For the wearable art artist to research, I picked Héctor Sos, and more specifically his “Paper Faces” project. The purpose of this project was to animate the publishing and printing industry as real and alive, and he did that by creating multiple textures of a simple thing like paper, then covered faces of models who were then photographed. He extended this idea by also printing/publishing the work in a book, making it a four step process where paper is involved in two of the steps.
Personally, I looked past the metaphor with his printing process and thought about how this art could express a person’s emotion without being able to see their face. This first paper face manipulates the body by extending the face with many pieces of square paper that seems to have been folded. The second uses pieces of black paper cut into diamond-like shapes, arranged to look like flowers or bows with a crease to give it more texture. The third uses multiple rectangular shaped pieces of small colored paper arranged in a random fashion.
The emotions that each one made me feel vary. From the first one I read calmness, but with a little bit of hidden sadness. The folded pieces alone make it feel kind of crazy, but the fact that they’re all aligned and positioned the same made it more put together, and the blue that is kind of under the white gives me this hidden idea of sadness or something under the surface.
The second one made me feel more like this person is judged from their possibly dark demeanor, but on the inside is a really great and gorgeous personality because the more you look at this dark layout you can see how the flowers line up and are pretty cool to look at.
The third made me think of a stressed out college student who puts a lot of time into their work but isn’t ever satisfied. The many colors of this one and the shape made me think of those little post it notes that we’d use when annotating books for class and how they always stuck out of the books. Their arrangement and many different colors gives me a high-strung student vibe that is associated with a lot of craziness in their schedule and high stress levels.
Through this way of using just paper a lot of creative things can result. Even though they’re all the same material, different feelings can be translated from each work which I appreciate. Through this way of making, a lot of attention has to go into the details of how it’s arranged but can omit something really special. I’m not sure I would go this route because of how abstract it would be and I’m not sure I could garner that much meaning from a single material, but if I were to go the single material route I think I would make something actually wearable and more tangible.
Peder Harvey Design 