Builds and Crafts
Laguna Art Museum: Recycled Couture (2024)
Artists were paired with different non-profit organizations centered around nature preservation in the Laguna area and tasked with designing and building runway looks entirely out of recyclable materials or garbage. I was paired with the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, which mainly helps with rescuing and rehabilitating sea lions that are often entangled in garbage and discarded fishing nets. The piece, entitled "Entangled Fates", is comprised of a bodice made of paper mache, a mattress topper, and discarded burlap with indents molded into the surface to replicate the injuries created by the fishing line and nets. The ropes, ribbon, fishing line that hold the bodice together by inserting into the indents were all pieces of litter, the net over the shoulder was created by cutting up used (and washed) garbage bags and making twine out of it. The headpiece is a sea lion carved out of the mattress topper and covered in burlap. The design won for Best Use of Materials.
Corsets and Crinoline 1844
Corset that was scaled up using a gridded pattern that was originally from the 1840s as found in Corsets and Crinoline. From the scaled-up pattern, it was then flat patterned closer to my measurements before being fit multiple times across 3 muslin mock-ups before being repatterned and making the final corset out of coutil and spiral steel boning.
The biggest visual alteration made to the original 1844 pattern was my decision to reduce the length of the front panel's point for ease of sitting, which can be seen as you go between the mock-up pieces and the final product.
