Needle Felt Self Portrait

Needle Felt Self Portrait

The technique I used to create this image is called needle felting.

     *It is a form or textile art, not painting.

It is done by:

• First felting your canvas. For me this meant taking a wool sweater and washing it in hot soapy water to shrink it. The process of felting is basically matting the fibers together and can not be undone once it has been completed.

• Next, you lay raw strands of wool, called wool rovings, on the canvas. These rovings can come in virtually any color. When working with colors you can't think of them as pigments such as paints or pastels, these colors do not mix. This can make it a little tricky to get the right look. 
• It may be helpful to understand how a color changes visually based on the colors that surround it. In this way you can strategically place shades near one another that will complement each other in the way you want.  

• Place a foam pad behind your canvas. This will give your needle something to stick into during the needle felting process.

• Using a needle-felting needle, begin to felt your fibers together. This is done by simply stabbing the needle through the fibers, locking them in place and securing them to your canvas. If you change your mind on where you want the fibers to be you can easily pull them out before they have been felted too much.

• Continue this process until the entire image is secured. It takes many repeated stabs with the felting needle to permanently lock the fibers into place, but once you have done this enough the fibers will be permanently secured and you will be able to wash the fabric if you want. 
• For artistic preference you may want to leave some fibers looser than others, this adds variety and texture to the piece.

Close up

This piece is related to my collection as an autobiographical piece. All clothing is autobiographical in that it is a visual language for us to communicate who we are, and who we want to be. This is more or less a very literal interpretation of the idea that clothing reflects who we are.

Need Altering?

One of the craziest ideas to me is the belief that people (especially women) have that if their clothes don't fit they must be wrong.

The very idea of dieting or exercising to fit into a pair of jeans or a bathing-suit is ridiculous to me. One is made of fabric, thread, and buttons... The other is made of bones, tissue and muscles. Wouldn't it be easier to alter your clothes rather than altering your body?

Beyond the physical makeup of clothing vs. the human body, I believe it is extremely mentally unhealthy to obsess over losing weight or altering one's body to fit a generic standard for physical sizes.

Exercise is great! It is never a bad thing to be focused on being more physically fit, faster, stronger, and healthier. Exercise for the purpose of looking like a photoshopped magazine model is unhealthy. Dieting to fit into a size 2 when you wear a size 6 because you think it'll make you happier is unhealthy. Health does not have a universal size.

Pre-Viability

Viability is defined as the point in a pregnancy that a fetus could potentially survive outside the womb. So the weeks of pre-viability are the weeks in the United States when it is still legal to have an abortion.

One of the common arguements "pro-choice" arguements I have heard is that the fetus is "just tissue" not a baby, not a person, not a living thing. This justification dehumanizes the fetus. My work here is an effort to humanize the fetus.

The onesie is an icon for babies and new life.

From a very early point in the pregnancy the fetus has arms and legs and could in theory fit into a onesie. These onesies are sized from the time the fetus has arms and legs until the latest point of legal abortion in a pregnancy, at which point the fetus has developed all 5 senses, can kick, swallow, breathe, and feel pain.

Nip & Tuck

The lines depicted here are representational of lines drawn on the body of a person who is about to undergo reconstructive surgery, ie. liposuction, breast augmentation, etc...

As women we often don't realize how our attitudes towards beauty are percieved by others, especially our children. According to a study, 80% of 10 year old girls in America are dieting. This is due to the views passed onto them by parental, sibling, peer, media and other influences. This video is one of the inspirations for this art work, and talks about this study and others that describe this problem in our country.

Babies are usually chubby, but they are perfect and adorable that way and we love them. No one would ever think of surgically altering a baby, so if their bodies are perfect the way they are why can't we feel that same way about our own bodies?

This piece to me is both a statement of body modification as well as the influence we have as adults on younger generations, and the responsibility this puts on all of us.

Porn Kills Love

This piece is probably my favorite of the show. I am a big supporter of the non-profit group Fight The New Drug, they are an anti-pornography advocacy group. One of this group's big campaigns is to educate people on the harmful effects pornography has on the brain, on relationships and on society. The #PornKillsLove slogan is used by them on most of their merchandise to spread the word that porn isn't cool.

Check their website out for yourself and "Get the Facts on Pornography" Fight The New Drug

Now, I am not affiliated with this group in anyway, but feel strongly about the cause and wanted to make something that accurately expressed the way I feel about it. I have felt for many years that porn isn't just nudity or sex, it also includes the visual suggestion of these things. This video is great, and it speaks briefly to a similar idea. It mentions that porn today is not just naked people, it is violent, it is degrading and dehumanizing. What we consider "soft core porn" is no longer mainstream pornography, the softer porn is now integrated into pop culture.

The point of reference in this video is at about 2:00-2:33 
The entire video is excellent to watch though.

Watching this video, having read books and many studies from fashion designers, fashion psychologists, social psychologists, researchers, and other experts I firmly believe that when we dress in a manner that is revealing or sexually stimulating we become pornography ourselves.

Society has become desensitized to this over the last 100 years. We now also have an outrageous number of men and young boys who are addicted to pornography; some studies say that close to 70% of college aged men are addicted to porn in our country. The desire for men to seek porn out is stimulated everyday by the clothing presented to them in virtually every public setting. The ability to overcome this addiction is made more difficult by the constant stream of soft porn being presented on a daily basis on TV, in magazines at the grocery store, and even walking down the street whether on billboards or the revealing outfits of women walking by.

Things like overly sexualized Carl's Jr. commercials or the annual Victoria's Secret televised fashion show are considered normal and ok. Men are expected to act like pigs. This to me is unacceptable and things need to change.

Regardless of differing opinions of right and wrong, every person that I have ever heard who has commited their life to the fashion world agrees that our clothing has an effect on our thoughts and behaviors as well as the thoughts and behaviors of those around us. Society accepts this belief when it comes to getting hired for a job, but somehow doesn't want to accept this same pattern of choice and consequence for other aspects of life. 

Our choices have a greater influence than we think.

#PornKillsLove #DontBePorn