Book Work

As I have said in my first post, I have worked from books before and thought I would put up a few sample from my Wuthering Heights project on the Foundation course last year.

This was a corset I began as a strand of my project looking at the idea of dresses representing the ghost of a person. I was looking at the paper dresses of Isabella de Borchgrave and wanted to create a grand paper dress that was mangled and worn to represent the Wuthering Heights character of Cathy, the wild and passionate main female role. The corset was made by image transferring a photocopy of a flower paper cutting I had done on to white fabric. I then padded the fabric and stitched around the black lines to create texture to the piece. I then burnt the chest area to show her intense passion and decorated the rim with paper roses, thorns and leaves. In the end it was deemed to complicated and I was encouraged to focus on a more simple method, however, I still like this piece and it is an avenue I would like to further explore in the future.

I also looked at, in the same project, paper flowers. I chose flowers as they were the best symbol of life (folloing the life of Cathy), and romance as well as wild abandon. SPOILERS... Because Cathy dies in the book after going slightly mad I looked at the decaying of flowers and this paper rose had its petals cut up and suspended from wires to look like they are rotting away. This is partly inspired by the Su Blackwell piece 'While You Were Sleeping' which was also an inspiration for the above paper dress idea....

While You Were
Sleeping - Su Blackwell