One great thing about RISD is Winter Session. After fall semester ends we get six weeks to explore something outside of our major. We’re encouraged to take studios outside of what we would normally tackle in our curriculum. One of the benefits of being an incoming transfer student is that I get higher pick priority than other sophomores in the school, which means I have access to some of the more popular classes.
After a lot of deliberation I decided I wanted to take “Monster.” What’s great about this class is that we just watch monster movies and make monsters. Each week we’re given a prompt to explore and watch monster movies that relate to that prompt. This project, the third so far, is an exploration of transformation, and things that change instantaneously (instead of metamorphosis, a slower change which we will explore next week).
I hadn’t had my haircut in close to six months, which was partly due to being unimpressed with the hair…cutteries, in town, and partly due to laziness. But ever since I signed up for Monster I knew I wanted to do a piece involving my own hair.
Hair is such a funny thing to me, and thinking about all the weird clumps of hair that a barber sweeps up everyday, that don’t decompose for a long, LONG time got me thinking about what would happen if those little clumps were given life.
I also liked the idea of transforming my own appearance as a result of this project. This prompt forced me to change the way I look in a few moments in order to obtain the material necessary to create it. Which adds a level of authenticity and makes it a bit more…unsettling to say the least. What I love about art school is that it was instrumental in this getting made. Outside of a school environment I would have had this idea, but put it on the back burner and never finished it. But in the context of education, and a deadline, it forced me to get in there and get a little gross, in the name of learning.
Gluing hair on the monster was an interesting challenge
