Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Fashion Animals

Fashion Animals 1990-2021:


This was a recent birthday card I made that referred to a project from 1990. I made a bunch of life size “fashion animals” - ladies in designer dresses with animal heads out of paper maché and assorted other stuff for display in a shoe store (yes, my mother’s shoe store!) 


Please remember this was over thirty years ago. I was not afraid of the difficulties of fabrication...or critical judgement- I have to at least appreciate those qualities in my younger self. 


The following images are the animals in my swanky first studio in Chicago, where I slept immediately next to my plaster and cement mixing and casting area, and the elevated train ran past the windows approximately every five minutes. 

(How often does the train go by? So often you won’t even notice it!- accolades to those who know what movie that quote comes from)


Not sure that my rendering ability has become much less awkward in the intervening three decades... but I still enjoy the opportunity to draw an aardvark in a dress. 


And there was a warthog in the original set of figures- but it does not feature in these photos I unearthed from a dusty filing cabinet.