Lauren's Art Archive

An archive of some of my art pieces that I've made over the years for others to see :)

[lauren-e-s-art]

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Here I have all my works from my Collage Studio May Term in NYC. Each piece was made over the course of 1-2 class periods and they corresponded to either prompts from my professor or ones we made up amongst ourselves.

Beehive - May 6, 2023 - newspaper, paper, and glue - 9" x 11"

This was the first collage we made in our first studio class in the city. It took me way too long to find out how to navigate the streets to find my way to the building we were using, but I made it. I have the tendency to overdo my collages, so I was kindly reminded that I don't have to fill the entire page.

Artichoke - May 8, 2023 - newspaper, paper, and glue - 9" x 11"

I'll be honest, I was working with scraps here, especially compared to my piece from the day before.

DOG - May 10, 2023 - newspaper, paper, and glue - 9" x 11"

I had to get creative with some squares of silver and gold paper.

G&S - May 13, 2023 - newspaper, paper, and glue - 9" x 11"

I cut out a bunch of tiny hats and put them on many of the following collages, including this one.

My Eyes - May 14, 2023 - newspaper, paper, and glue - 9" x 11"

There's a song called 'My Eyes' that I recommend listening to, specifically from 2:15 onwards.

Cliffs and Cans - May 17, 2023 - newspaper, paper, and glue - 9" x 11"

Made with my breakfast.

PINK - May 18, 2023 - newspaper, paper, and glue - 9" x 11"

Interesting to work with bigger scraps. Now that I listen to k-pop, I actually know who the woman is.

Dancing - May 20, 2023 - newspaper, paper, and glue - 9" x 11"

Dancing transcends culture.

Elephants with Hats - May 22, 2023 - newspaper, paper, and glue - 9" x 11"

How people thought I went to school when they found out I grew up in Kenya.

Girls - May 23, 2023 - newspaper, paper, and glue - 9" x 11"

I stayed away from using words since the first collage I made at the beginning, so it was fun to try it out on my final piece.

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Hashira

June 15, 2022 - January 25, 2024

Cloth, thread, beads, buttons, and ribbon

4" x 4"

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Kenyan Liberty

December 13, 2022

Shuka, cloth, beads, plastic bags, wire, string, and twine

9.5' x 3' x 3.8'

This was my overall final piece from my Advanced Studio class. I wanted to give a visual to what it was like growing up in Kenya but being born and going to college in the US was like.

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Shark Man in Crocs

November 16, 2022

Clay, spray paint, paint

3.7' x 2.3' x 1.9'

This guy is my pride and joy. Here's some process photos:

I brought my own personal crocs into the studio to model these off of.

It's hard to put into perspective how large this piece is without a picture of me standing next to it, but just know that the tail is as tall as the main body.

Here's the little guy after he went through the kiln the first time, before I painted him.

This is the imprint of the tail on the plastic covering on the ground that the piece was placed on so I could spray paint it. It reminds me of something...

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Rose - September 12, 2022 - wire - 2" x 15" x 1'

Loops - September 12, 2022 - wire - 10" x 10" x 10"

Spiraling at an Angle - September 12, 2022 - wire - 9" x 9" x 11"

Honey Drizzler -September 12, 2022 - wire - 3' x 5" x 2'

These pieces are from my advanced sculpture class. The prompt was to get a long stretch of thick wire, tie the ends together, and shape them into something either abstract or naturalistic. I have neutral feelings about this project because it was good to get some experience with a material I hadn't used before, but the wire was coated in a kind of oil, so usually I would have to wear an apron and gloves. For tighter curves and angles, we could use more heavy duty tools like pliers, which was helpful. Working with wire gave me some experience that I applied to the creation of the final project I made for this class, which I'll post after this. If I folded the wire onto itself and wrapped it a few times, it became a lot more sturdy which I did with the stem of the flower and the handle of the honey drizzler.

There was a bit of a weird situation with this class because I was taking advanced sculpture, but since there were only 3 of us, and there were almost 20 students in the regular sculpture class, they combined us. We would be learning the same things with the rest of the class, but our projects had higher standards and they were expected to be more complex and sometimes bigger in size, hence why these pieces were over a foot in any direction.

In some of the projects I'll post after this that I made in this class, I'll try to remember what the instructions were for the sculpture students vs. what they were for us in the advanced section.

For this one, the sculpture students had to use just one piece of wire and they had to be around a foot in one direction at least. For the advanced students, we could use two or three pieces of wire, they had to be much bigger, and we couldn't get away with making random shapes like many of the others could. We had the experience and ability to be purposeful, so my teacher wouldn't let us slide, not that I minded.

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My Mirrored Home

February 12, 2023

Paper

1' x 1 1/2' x 9"

When I took this mixed media studio my professor was obsessed with 'place' and some other base words, so we had to make an exact copy of our home scaled down to about 1' tall. I dug around on google maps so I could find the outline of my house back home in Kenya, then I asked my mom to take some photos from all angles so I could get all the dimensions right. The only issue was that I folded everything the wrong was so this is actually a mirror of what my home looks like. This is the closest you'll get to seeing what my house look like. It was actually pretty fun to make - x-acto knives and I work well together.

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Paper Origami Flower

January 25, 2022

Paper

This wasn't from a class; I was really in my origami phase when I was working my office job and when I had time I would make paper projects to either decorate my office or send them to the office down the hall like love letters. Let's just say the other office was well decorated. I learned how to make many interesting shapes but this was the biggest I made.

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Plastic Eye

January 27, 2022

Plastic and tape

At the beginning of my 3D form and concept class, our first assignment was to make a piece a meter in any direction out of this plastic and some tape, so I chose an eye - I just felt it calling to me. It was definitely interesting to figure out how and where to cut because we had to blow them up and we couldn't do that if there were random holes. Originally I wasn't a fan of this, but I warmed up to it, especially the more I embrace the notion of not having my pieces looking overly realistic. After this we made a huge rubber duck, which was technically a group project, but you know when a teach assigns a group project when half the class doesn't even want to take the class? I'm not saying some of us put in more effort than others buuuuuuuut:

Plastic Duck - February 10, 2022 - plastic and tape

It took a white but It was honestly more fun and even easier making a bigger piece.

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Wearable Eye

April 26, 2022

Cardboard and spray paint

This was the final project of my 3D form and concept class. Our teacher taught us different ways to attach and wedge together pieces of cardboard, then we had to choose a part of the body to recreate in some way. We could do something abstract or more realistic, I chose to go the more realistic route. I technically made two pieces, the body piece itself and a hat. Unfortunately, I was not able to keep this piece together, so I can only look at the pictures fondly from a distance. Let's get into it.

I chose to make an eye, no surprise there, so I had to find a way to make a sphere - it was a 3D class after all. I decided to base the shape off of a football (soccer ball), connecting hexagons and pentagons together. Here's a look at how that slowly came together, once I was able to get the exact angles right so everything would match:

I connected each piece together using rectangles, cutting them on one side so they would bend the other way, and then gluing them to each piece. One upside of working with cardboard is that it's much easier to attach compared to wood or sometimes even fabric (I say as a fabric artist). One problem I faced was that due to the weird angles and shapes, I wasn't able to make a full sphere, so I had to stop at about the 3/5 point.

I decided to add the iris and pupil as separate pieces instead of just drawing them on and I shaped them so I could detach them and wear them as a hat. But first, I had to paint everything. I dug around the art closets and found red, yellow, black, and some white spray paint. Here are the 5 pieces sprayed separately:

I shaped the iris and pupil by cutting circles out of cardboard, then cutting out a triangle from it, cutting slits on the outside from the center to the edges, then folded them inward so they became more 3D. Please refer to the pictures to understand what I'm describing.

The eyeball itself gave me some trouble because the white spray paint barely came out. I tried to evenly cover each side, but it was having performance issues. For the red iris, I used a combination of red, black, and my hand to make a kind of pattern by wiping and spreading around the paint to give it some depth like you would see with a regular eye. The pupil stayed black and the twinkle ended up being yellow. Was it because I ran out of white paint or because artistic inspiration struck me?

Moving on, I had a sunhat that happened to be the size of the iris, so I taped them together and wore them with my 'vampire dress' and some cool makeup (that I'm gatekeeping):

If you would like to see a different angle, please refer to the second picture at beginning of the post. The only part of this whole project that was not circular or spherical in some way was the one square of yellow cardboard that I added to add a bit more of a twinkle. Here is a view of the eyeball from the side:

It's big enough that not only could I slither under it, but I could really camp out there if I wanted to. I could have installed a lamp and everything. I made a video showing the completion of the ball to show my audience what it looked like, but my face is there so I can't show you guys :/. When I had to dispose of my project, I was able to throw it into a huge trash bin they had sitting behind one of the residence buildings, but unfortunately I cut my finger on the cardboard:

I'm not being dramatic, I promise it hurt a lot.

This whole project was based on this picture someone took of my eye, which you've seen before:

I really do like that photo. Not only have I recreated it in a 3D cardboard piece, but I also drew it in charcoal (scroll down a bit and you'll see it).

I wouldn't mind working with cardboard again, but I would need to be careful because there's a very fine line between creative and tacky when working with it.

[lauren-e-s-art]

Candy Ballet Dress

March 21, 2022

Candy, thread, and cloth

I was taking a studio class called 3D Form and Concept, and it was an evening class, so the hours were 6pm-9pm twice a week, which was also the time I was volunteering to help my school's drama department with theater makeup from 6pm-7:30pm.

I was known for my weird face paint my first two years in university, which is why I was asked to help. They could trust their faces to me because I was also wearing makeup with just as weird designs. In the future I might post some of my face art.

I'm just grateful my teacher let me help out the few weeks they requested me for. I would come in to class an hour and a half late and he would just pull me to the side and update me on what we were doing. For this project, we had to pick a piece of paper out of a cup, and there was a different material written on each one. Some were glass, mirror, paint, tape, dirt, etc. The paper I picked had 'candy'. This was probably one of the most costly projects I've made, since I usually just recycle, reuse, or borrow from people. I'd like to say I can be pretty frugal.

At first I was going to use melted sugar to make the skirt, but it wasn't working and even if I had mastered the technique, I wouldn't have had time to make a whole ballet skirt. Here's what my attempt looked like:

Don't mind the shakiness, it was in my non-dominant hand. It was really pretty, but I was worried it would melt, so I moved on. I ended up buying a bunch of candy: licorice sticks, m&m's, peppermints, gummy worms, and some kind of rainbow sticks. I used all but the licorice sticks to decorate the corset - the base being a black tank top. I use some double-sided tape which looked really put together at first. Here's what the design looked like:

My original plan was to wear the piece, but once I put it on, I couldn't get it off. I was a bit panicked for a bit because I couldn't put my arms down or I would melt the candy, so I eventually had to cut the sides so I could get it off myself and onto a mannequin. Here's what it looked like when I was wearing it:

Cool pattern right? Peep the Kenyan bracelet if you thought I was lying about where I'm from. Here's what it looked like after I cut it off and tied it to the mannequin with a ribbon:

Digging through my documentation of the process, I found a few videos I made while wearing the corset, first talking about it, then sewing the skirt while wearing the corset. I impress myself sometimes. Because I had to stretch the top, some candy fell off, so I had to go back in and reapply some pieces. I borrowed my friend's underskirt to make the skirt more voluminous. I have some time lapse videos of me making the skirt while wearing the corset, but I can't and won't show those, so here's what the stitches looked like close up:

Turns out I can only upload 1 video per post :/. Anyways, They're all stitched to a thick piece of elastic. It actually ended up being pretty heavy. Shout out to the mannequin for holding like 10 kg of candy.

I think I could have solved the not-fully-decorated-to-the-best-of-my-ability corset problem if I had more time, but I was taking other classes and unfortunately I cannot devote all my time to only one thing. As I make these posts years after making some of these projects, I keep having the thoughts like 'I could do so much better now', and while it's fine to have these thoughts, it's important to give your past self grace. I was doing what I could with the skills and materials I had at the time.

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Candycane Slippers

December 8, 2021

Felt wool

10" x 3" x 5"

One of the final projects I made in my fiber and material class was these felt/wool slippers. You know when people make stuffed animals by stabbing felt a ton until it shapes into what they want? OH IT'S CALLED NEEDLE FELTING. I had to look it up. Anyways we had to make slippers. I actually documented the creation process because it was so wild. First, you start by wrapping your feet in felt in any pattern you desire:

You then cover it with sheer stockings to keep it in place and thoroughly scrub them with soap to get it all wet and help to make everything stick together (I'm trying to remember the exact process 3 years later, this is why you need to document your process while making something):

After that, cover everything in multiple layers of plastic wrap and shove your feet into tight shoes:

Trust me, my docs were really straining to hold everything together, but you need something to keep everything in place the whole day. Leave everything in place for the rest of the day - we applied these in the morning in my 8am-11am studio class - and spend your day going about your regular activities. I had other classes, work, and a lot of hills to walk up, so I really put the work in. At the end of the day, unwrap everything and it should look like this:

Since these have somewhat melded to your feet, cut them at the back of your ankle and carefully pry them off. Let them dry overnight. Don't mind the messy dorm room and bare feet.

The following day, at least that's when I got back to it, get some new felt and some needles. You'll be able to see what I did in this video:

It's in slow motion, which is kind of funny, but you can see what I'm doing. I took some strips of red/neon pink felt and stretched them over a thick piece of foam so I could sink a needle tool into the felt. I suggest you unattach the felt from the foam pad every once in a while so they don't get permanently stuck together. I also did this to the slippers themselves to make sure they maintained their shape, even adding extra padding just in case. I also made some leaves and berries to decorate the outside as you saw in the beginning and I'll show again. In the end once everything's attached, mine turned out like this:

You can add buttons or maybe a zipper to the back of the slipper where you made the cut so when you put them on they stay on.

I had fun making these slippers. Not only did I learn how to needle felt by hand, but I also got to put my feet in the weirdest environment they've ever been in and show everyone around me how weird my shoes looked. I would like to try this again, maybe making a bigger piece. I can imagine having fun making a pattern as I go, basically drawing with the felt.

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Dog Firepit Mural

December 30, 2021

Cement and river stones

So this is another out-of-school project that was also somewhat of a group project with my family over the Christmas break of 2021-2022. My parents own some cottages up in the Aberdares in rural Kenya. They're really cute, there's a river out front, and it can be nice and cool depending on the time of year. We always bring our dogs and my parents are always adding new things to the property. My dad decided to add a fire pit to the side of a hill and assigned making a mural to us girls, so we gathered a bunch of river stones of different colors and shaped them into our past dogs. Left to right: Pixel, Cheza ('play' in Swahili), Nandi, Ndevu ('beard' in Swahili), with an 'H' in the middle as our family initial. Nandi's puppy, either Rye or Chai is standing on the seat in the second picture and Keg, who's the same breed as Ndevu, is standing in the third photo. I would enjoy making another mural in the future out of any materials, maybe glass or stones or plastic. Bonus: my back was so sunburnt afterwards.

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My Eye is Up Here

Fabric and thread

6"x4"

June 11, 2022

The summer after my sophomore year of university my family came to the US to live close to my mom's side of the family for a few months, so I lived with them. I didn't end up working, which some may disapprove of, but I will forever be grateful for the break since I had just finished an emotional and tiring year. I got back from my May term class in Ecuador right before me family got there.

I remembered my fiber and materials class I had taken over a semester before and was filled with the need to dive back in. Instead of going big again, I went small and made something eye-based (remember my eye obsession). This is the first my family had seen of my embroider not from photos, so it was fun to make and get into the grove again. This was also right before I made my big 2-year long project that I'll probably post right after this or maybe not, it's up to me 😜.

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Sam's Soul

December 11, 2021

Fabric, thread

3.5' x 2'

Remember how I said this class really awakened my inner artist? This was the piece that did it. My professor taught us this Japanese patchwork technique called 'sashiko'. It became popular among lower class citizens as a way to patch up their clothes in an artistic way, and eventually when it became popular enough the upper class started to copy them and made it somewhat a sign of status. I fell in love with this project, losing track of time while listening to audio books and sewing for hours in the classroom or in my bed. I would drop into a state where I wouldn't move from my position for hours and the people flowed around me without me noticing me. Even years and many embroidery projects later I have yet to reenter that state.

The base of this piece is a Kikoi cloth, a style of fabric native to Kenya and I centered my best friend's face onto the middle, then surrounded it with fabrics of different textures and colors, sewing it with as many different techniques as I could learn. My only regret with this project was stitching a face, as it's not my favorite thing to sew. I tend to work in a more abstract way.

Me and one of my classmates were given extensions with this assignment due to our chosen sizes and how diligently we were working on our projects, so I was able to work on mine until the end of the semester while almost everyone else finished theirs in about 2 weeks. I've been working on a much smaller scale since then, usually 4"x4" or 6"x6", so it would be fun to try something bigger sometime.

Another thing that I like about patchwork embroidery is that my style isn't expensive. I tend to use leftover scraps of fabric from surrounding peoples' unwanted clothes, blankets, and leftover fabric, so I usually only have to by the thread and sewing tools, which tend to last for a while.

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Tote Bag Strap #2 - February 3, 2023 - thread

Tote Bag Strap #1 - June 13, 2022 - thread

These are part of an ongoing personal project for when two straps on a tote bag of mine broke and I had the chance to make a fun design when reattaching everything. I'm assuming the other two will unattach at some point, so I hope I have my sewing supplies on hand when they do. Or a stapler.

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Masaai Patterned Napkins and Towels

December 11, 2021

Fabric ink on cloth

The prompt for this series was to do research on a people group/culture and design pattern to print onto napkins, towels, and a white square of cloth. I chose the Masaai tribe since I've been around them my whole life and I based the red-brown color of the ink on the natural color of the dirt in Kenya. We did use linoleum blocks to print the patterns; I made an elongated mask, an arrow/spear line, a shield, and two were based off of a piece of jewelry and a wooden carved man.

These made great gifts obviously.

Here's some more photos so you can see the details better: