Millennium Woman

For my individual project, I'm making a life size bust with both audio and video components. This piece is part of a series that I've been working on that is about different aspects of women portrayed through various types of sculptures. The bust is was formed using a dress form and wire mesh to shape the structure and then covered with tissue paper and decoupage. After taking the sides off the dress form I then covered the inside with more tissue paper. Once the 2 pieces are strong enough, I'm then going to put stereo and electrical wires along with parts from inside a radio on the inside. After everything is put together, a flat 7" inch screen TV or DVD player will be placed inside the bust. The screen will be blank with white noise and the audio will be of everyday sounds.

This piece is a continuation of a previous piece I did several years ago for my senior show at Herron. The piece wasn't as successful as I had hope for because that was the 1st time I had made a sculpture with an image transfer. The image came out great, but the sculpture, not so great. I've never taken a sculpture class before, so I used handmade paper and acrylic extending gel that is added to acrylic paint as my glue and formed the shape of the bust using the dress form. The bust over time had collapsed and I was really interested in this form and applying paper to shape it. So I began to think about how I could improve this piece. After experimenting a little, I found out that the wire mesh was easy to manipulate over the dress form and the many layers of tissue paper and decoupage made the structure stronger to be a free standing wall mount.