A Community of Colours

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The Medium - Fabric mache’

The medium I chose for my series of sculptures was meant to respond to a series of requisites: first of all it needed to be able to be painted and made colourful, fabric is the preferred surface choice of most painters, so it was a pretty obvious choice. 

Sculptures have to be toy like, so with simple shapes, not excessive use of details, they have to communicate inclusion and not being intimidating by excessive realism and fragility. Fabric, just barely stiffened with glue to keep its shape, remains quite soft and very light weight, especially in conjunction with pressed newsprint armatures, has a real toy like feel to it. 

The choice was then between a single sheet of stiffened fabric and a layered construction. The single sheet had to be really hard in order to keep its shape properly, especially for outdoor use, so I chose layered. It is a fabric equivalent of paper mache’, a popular craft medium for kids.

Fabric details will then be applied once the painting is done, while metal wire addition are embedded between layers for stabilization.

An example from previous work

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The Inspiration

The project is inspired by the idea of community making and union between different people of different ethnicity. My sculptures aim to represent what every human being have in common with everybody else, specifically in relation to: physicality, environment and culture.

Physicality is about the body features that are similar for all human beings: two hands, two feet, two eyes, a heart; the environment in which everybody lives is composed by: fauna, flora, urban areas, energy production. Cultural traits might be different between one ethnicity and another, but all deal with the same topics, including: food, knowledge, music, the arts.

From an artist perspective, my work is inspired by the colourful, playful sculptures of Niki de Saint Phalle. She used materials and mediums that are hard, though, I want to transpose that vitality into a more soft, feminine medium, that’s why I chose to use fabric. The idea of composing large scale fabric installations is inspired by another artist: Joana Vasconcelos, whose work I find fascinating, too.

The festival target audience is mainly of young people, so I chose to use bold, toy-like colours and a visual, icon based language.

Niki de Saint Phalle

Joana Vasconcelos

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A Community of colours project

This blog is dedicated to my current volunteer project for an installation and collective performance that will take place at BlueFire Street Festival in Dublin, Ireland, on the 16th of September 2017.

Posted are all the pictures of my work in progress. I need to complete 12 fabric mache’ sculptures to use as iconic decorations on the Square's “torches”. Huge steel poles that I am going to wrap and decorate with colourful fabric, together with fellow artist Sinead O’Connor. We will need to collect 6,000 signatures on coloured tags to be installed on the same torches as part of the installation/performance. Those will be necessary to complete the work, it’s all about forming communities.