Module 6 chapter 5

Creating a totem to celebrate my personal research theme of the seaside.

I decided to make my totem a celebration of Dungeness beach, which over the last couple of years has become a very important inspirational source for me.

My initial totem is a combintion of found items and a selection of sketched shells stones and rusty artifacts.

6/5/1

6/5/2

I cut out the sketched shapes and used a piece of found metal to connect them.

6/5/3

Next I worked on the plain shapes adding coloured paper and markmaking and then added the plastic vegetable bag netting to give a feeling of trapped shells in beach debris.

6/5/4

I now had some shapes and colours to work with and moved on to some digital play.

6/5/5

This inspired me to take the shapes into fabric and stitch. At the same time I made another visit to Dungeness and looked for a larger support for the tomem and developed the second idea.

6/5/7

6/5/8

6/5/9

And more ideas using other pieces of metal and fishing net, combined with the textile/paper samples.

6/5/10

6/5/11

At this point I made a sketch of the structure of the piece.

6/5/12

And then I had a digital play to see how it might develop.

6/4/13

The LHS could be w/s machine embroidery, with paper and fabrics included. The middle piece could be scrim, with text interwoven and the RHS could be sheers with pockets for found items. It could be that just one of these ideas was used.

The totem will be resolved in a later chapter.

In the meantime more sketches of the metalwork.

6/4/14

6/4/15

Maybe these could be developed into decorative pieces to form the the final totem, as sketching has also become a vital part of my design process.

This is the non digital sketch for totem 1 and should follow on from 6/5/5