Artists for Inspiration

First Artist: Dina Torkia

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Torkia is a Muslim designer and blogger. Her work has come an interest to me because of the use of colours for her hijabs (scarves). In her YouTube videos she mentions her purposes for using the colours, materials and sizes. As a Muslim myself I feel that I can relate to her because I wear hijab myself and as an art student, it is unusual for me to wear natural colours all the time, or same style. From this artist, I feel that I can use her technique of dying materials when it comes to selecting materials.

Second Artist: Stina Persson

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Most of my colour pallets have been blacks, greys and whites. So for colour to inspire me more I have chosen this artist, Persson. I am familiar with her work as I worked with it before. A specific reason to why her work interests me is because, as I was looking through my first drawing days, I came across Fig 3 and realised how similar our work is. Fig 3 was created from ink and bleach.

Third Artist: Susie Macmurray

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Macmurray is an installation artists that works repetition and unusual objects to create her pieces. one piece of work of hers that interested me was the one with shells filled with red velvet materials Fig 2. Macmurray held a lecture and explained that in order to create that piece, it took months of cleaning out the shells and looking for identical shells. this is obviously something you would need patience for. I have experienced a snippet of this from college from my 'depression' project that I worked on, which required me to make several masks as you see the final piece in Fig 3.

From researching artists that I can relate to and who interest me, huge installations has come across as a major interest for me. In the past I have adapted my work to being on a smaller scale with less detail. But from the experiences at uni and looking at other artists (singer, fashion designers, painters etc.) I feel that the best scale for me to work with is big like Macmurray in Fig 1.

Henna

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Throughout my Summer in 2015, I went back to my interests of henna designs. After the first year of university, I felt more advanced in designing with different objects, materials and techniques. So I incorporated these skills into my henna designs.

Fig 1 is where I first began my designs (on paper). I then moved onto applying henna on my own body as you can see on Fig 2. I then thought about how I could apply the Fig 1 design with henna onto myself without leaving strong stained smudges; as henna tends to leave stains within seconds. this skill required an awful lot of patience, practice and accuracy. The outcome of how I did that is seen on Fig 3. As I mentioned before when planning to do big installation pieces, like Fig 4 I would love to have the ability to do my henna designs on larger areas on the body.