And I will soon enough. But first, a teaser or two. Explanations later.

Firstly, I have a spiffy new Honours degree (!). Secondly, an exhibition (my first outside of school!). And a critique (!). I am so excited! Far too many exclamation marks!

- Lydia

I like small things. Tiny things too. So I thought I’d share a few artists working with the small and tiny that I’ve found (actually, I knew them all before making my own miniatures, but that matters not).
There is Slinkachu and his “Little People: A Tiny Street Art Project. He appropriates and makes teeny tiny people and other objects (I think some are train-set models) and places them in the real world – as he says “Little handpainted people, left in London to fend for themselves.”. There are many, many works shown on his blog. And being street art, he only sells prints of them. This work is called “Cash Machine”,

And this is where it’s located:

I love his work so much! He says that he wanted to place it underneath an ATM, but they were too busy. I don’t really think it matters too much in this case – I like the idea of a cash machine in a dodgy alleyway, and the man not wanting to get mugged or something. Slinkachus works make me consider how a miniature fits into the real world, rather than sitting apart from it. The next tiny works are Snowglobes by Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz. I have no idea whether they actually make the globes, or whether they are just photographs, but either way they are bizarre and funny. This work is called ‘Traveler 135 at Night’. (Again, there are many more at their site)

Ricky Swallow makes absolutely amazing wood carvings, and also uses other materials with a great amount of skill. He has a series of miniature works with moving parts, using portable record players as motors and housings, named “Even the odd orbit”. This one is called “Rooftop shoot out with chimpanzee”, which is at the NGA, Canberra. The Chimp is in the orange jumpsuit, and he turns around, pointing his gun.

These works make me think about how miniatures are set up in a gallery situation, and the use of found objects combined with built (to scale) environments.

I am thinking about making miniature people. And then the only miniature art I can find is predominantly about people, often using train set models like these:

Which can be easily painted or modified (I assume, haha). But so far I have only made miniature objects myself. I’m not sure if it’s worth making my own people and objects – to keep my own “style” I suppose – and also to be able to choose my own scale. I might have to get some people models, and maybe some sculpey, and have afew tests to see which ones I like better. In the mean time, I’ll leave you with the cutest tiny food-related things I’ve seen in a while from Re-ment (which I actually found on Bake and Destroy – I admit it, I love food blogs!).

Sooo cute!

- Lydia

And Nigel posted a picture of one of my works in ArtWranglers!*

I love the name he put to it.

So excitement! Thanks Nigel!

- Lydia

*note: please ignore the nasty comment. I tried to, but then the idea of being married to Visual Art made me giggle a lot.

This one is a costume-themed hentai manga. Pretty much a ‘dirty bunny-girl comic’, haha. I made all these out of air drying clay, and hand painted every detail on the damned tiny things. For a size reference, each capsule is about 6-7cm in diameter, and maybe 8cm tall.

In these two there are some absolutely rad earphones with stars on them – we saw some pink versions of these on a very cute girl and a friend of mine picked some up as a souvenir – and there are also some sandwiches. Ham, cheese and lettuce with wasabi mayo on one, and an egg ‘salad’ for the other. With no crusts on.

And here is some sushi! Yay! And a slightly better view of the chute. My goodness this one was tiny.

And some more sushi! Yaaayy! These are actually a work continuing from my inflatables. Though instead of being inflated, these ones are stuffed with polyester filling. And comparatively, these are much smaller. For example, the ebi/prawn is about 20cm long, and the square one is about 15cm.. uh, square. These should turn out to be a series, less than 10 pieces, probably on plinths or something, haha.

There are some more details and afew more pictures of  all these things on my Flickr site.

-Lydia

In the little capsules there are toilet slippers (at the Dohokan we had some of these exact slippers shown below, except they were red and blue!). There is a bucket from the Onsen, with a ‘modesty towel’. There is some Green Tea (Matcha) ice cream (picture below from Dining Bar Musashi in Sydney).

There’s a loaf of bread – which is now bizarre after looking at this post by Tokyo Times – you see, I now realise that my bread is completely the wrong shape. Memories are indeed funny, and selective – I remembered the ‘important thing’, being the number of slices (that being six), but I forgot about the shape, so I must have substituted my traditional ‘symbol for bread’ into my memory, haha (wow, I’ve been thinking too much about my theory class – ‘Memory’). Anyway, there are some navy blue Jika-tabi (two-toed workman/farmer shoes) off to the side. And lastly, you can just see the fingertips of some white gloves that all drivers – taxi, bus, shuttle bus, and train drivers – wear.

Soo, yeah. That is my current work. Next up, I believe, is a series of scenes – for example, inside a train, a road crossing, a shop, a temple, etc. – either set up in bigger versions of the capsules, like toys not put together, or set up in sushi/bento boxes, stacked on top of one another. And lastly, I think there will be an inflatable capsule, maybe with a chair inside? We’ll see eventually.

- Lydia

One good thing is that I’ve gotten ideas for my work back here. You know capsule toys, or Gashapon?

These are Gashapon machines. You stick your ~100-500 yen in, turn the knob, and out comes your capsule toy! I never saw this many in one place, but Cabel at Cabel’s Blog lol did. I wish I had!

This is what the capsules themselves look like (picture taken by mock-turtle on Flickr).
Anyway – the capsules – I loves them. I got a lot of them as presents – mostly Evangelion, Legend of Zelda, and Mario ones. Ok, a couple of Hello Kitty ones too.. So I ended up with quite a few of the actual capsules sitting around. Pretty much, I decided to make tiny things to put inside them. The objects will be things I noticed in Japan, that were either ‘different’, or just interesting. Like the loaves of bread, white gloves, parasols, and toilet slippers. I think another series will be scenes I remember – such as the trains, temples, and bathrooms.

I’m going to have to write a few entries to make up for not writing while I was away. We stayed at Kyoto Seika University’s International ‘dorm’ called the Dohokan. The computer there was almost a dinosaur – technically not from this century/millennium anyway. It couldn’t deal with wordpress, facebook, ipods or most cameras. So my photo-contingency plan of offloading them onto something else didn’t work. And my blog-post-every-few-days plan didn’t work either. Oh well. Soon enough I will have lovely photos to talk about. But here’s a video I found of rain, from a view at the Dohokan (taken by a previous student staying there – Nick, aka Kiloburn). I think my room was the one directly upstairs. I remember that view, and stairs! How nostalgic for me!

Will be backtracking, and writing more posts about the Japan trip in the near future.

- Lydia

Anyway, a friend of mine was telling me about this rapid prototyper that uses sugar as its medium!
(Note: a rapid prototyper is like a 3D printer – it takes a 3D model from a program, and makes it out of plastic, by laying down melted plastic strings, and moving back and forth, eventually making many, many, many layers.)
So this rapid prototyper is called the CandyFab, and is created by the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory. And it makes things out of sugar!!! Look at it go!

Instead of laying down melted sugar itself, it starts off with a layer of sugar, and a small nozzle blasts heat that melts the sugar below. Then more sugar is sprinkled in a layer, and then more layers are melted. The end product of caramelised, solid sugar, is fished out of the rest of the sugar I suppose, and there it is!
I know it’s not the same kind of effect – for them it’s a question of affordability, and also a bit of novelty – but I really love the idea of making things out of sugar. If only I could use this to make completely awesome sugar cubes!

And speaking of lollies (and Japan being only afew days away) – in Japan i want to visit this lolly/dessert shop called Toraya. It sells traditional confectionery called Wagashi, and has done for centuries! How beautiful are they? I wonder if they taste as good as they look… I guess I’ll find out soon.

-Lydia

I found this absolutely adorable giant inflatable rubber duckie by Florentijn Hofman at the Wooster Collective. For the exhibition “Loire Estuary 2007″, the Duck sits in the Loire River itself. I kindof like the contrast of the dull, gloomy weather to the bright and happy duck.

And the taco pointed me to Engadget to see this inflatable dress/chair combo, called the Self-Sustainable Chair by JooYoun Paek. The artist says:

“Self-Sustainable Chair, a dress made out of polyethylene, connected to shoes that pump air into an inflatable bubble attached to its rear part on each step. The dress slowly transforms into a chair with each step and holds the person to sit on it naturally… Self-Sustainable chair is a conceptual garment that motivates users to consistently switch between walking and sitting as a loop behavior on the street. The balance between exercise and rest would be maintained by wearing this suit. The purpose of this project is to transform the humdrum experiences produced by routine walking commutes into an amusing interactive performance.”

Ages ago I saw this work called ‘Pump It Up‘ by Nacho Carbonell Ivars at We Make Money Not Art. There are little rubber blobs, attached by tubes to an inflated chair. You are invited to sit on the chair, and in doing so, you inflate the blobs – which turn out to be cute little animals (or ‘parasites’).

That will be it for inflatables today. As I said I’ll add more as I find them.

-Lydia

At the beginning of the year I went on a trip to Melbourne with a friend to visit my brother. We went to a dress up birthday party one night (Wrestle-mania themed, but we dressed up as a pirate band – of course!). We played our instruments (a recorder, drum, and accordion), danced and got tipsy, then started contemplating the serious questions (as you do at a dress up party).
What did we really want to make at school this year?

Turns out I really wanted to make giant inflatable sushi. Yes. Inflatable Sushi.

Well, that didn’t really explain much, so here goes:
I originally saw some very very cute things like this crochet sushi (by NeedleNoodles on Etsy), and sushi pillows on the web.

And so I thought I needed my own soft sushi to cuddle. I mostly wanted to make cushions or pillows from fabric because I can’t crochet. Then I suppose I thought about it developing into art, and about scale, and materials. At first it was going to be cardboard sushi houses – to live in for a couple of days as ‘performance’. Then I thought inflatable would be much more fun. Hmm, I’ll go into some more of that thinking process in another post.

So, with the inflatable sushi, first off I had to see if my idea was viable. I tend to think of things that just aren’t practical. It was a great relief when I found this awesome site called AKAirways. It documents many inflatable projects from designs and ideas through to making, completion and display. It doesn’t expressly show you how to make ‘bubbles’ from start to finish, but there are some handy diagrams, short explanations, as well as informative process pictures and videos.

Bubble Head by AKAirways.

And I found it is true that you can make an inflatable with just some garbage bags, an iron, wax paper, and a fan. But now I have moved on to clear polyethylene scrap sheeting and a soldering iron. Soon enough I’ll get some new sheeting, and maybe even have a go with shower curtains. I will need to get some substantial things done in the next week, because I have a crit next Wednesday – eep!

I will take some process pictures between now and then, and post them to show you what on earth I’m on about.

-Lydia

I am going to Japan in a little over a month, so to get into the spirit:

Thankyou I Can Has Cheezburger!
Loves it <3

-Lydia