We are all plastic figurines in some sense.

I have this obsession with learning to blow glass one day, as well as learning how to incorporate plastics (recycled of course) into my work. So when I stumbled across ways to manipulate plastic grocery bags I was very excited. Yet this is coming from the girl who fell in love with duct tape wallets and purses. A friend of mine got really into recycling and some how learned to make purses out of plastic shopping bags. Basically you collect plastic bags that interest you or are plain and you sandwich them between two or sometimes four sheets of wax paper. After you have arranged the bags the way you like you simply iron them on low heat (like when you trap leaves between wax paper). Be careful not to melt the wax paper or plastic. By overlapping sections of the bags you will eventually end up with a "sheet" of plastic that you can sew together and add fabric to for a lining. You can also iron strips and use the strips to weave a bag (I am not exactly sure on how that works Siarra has yet to show me this method). But the idea of flattening plastic and making it into workable sheets/strips is so simple yet it has never crossed my mind. I already love working with fabric and this franken-plastic material would be perfect to work with due to its ability to flow, and bend. 

A video that uses a similar process to create a laptop bag can be seen here :

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=0oddEWnj7X0&feature=PlayList&p=B8B6653312E5E2A5&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=11

 If that link isn't working (it gave me some trouble) Then go to youtube and type in How to fuse plastic bags into laptop case.

I researched a bit and apparently there are a lot of people out there making purses, bags, jewelry, and even dresses out of grocery bags! I think this is pretty sweet and eco-friendly.

An artist I have been looking at recently is Nathalie Schnider-Lang I thought that since I was about to venture to Berlin in a few months, I should research some artists who practice in Germany. Here work is composed of mainly the figure and nothing is really smoothed out the pieces are not in full really either. They melt into one another or a base and have a foreign and rough texture that obscures the image slightly yet still allows one to read what the piece is. She is one of my links on the right side of the blog and the website directs you to her work (figurative Plastik).

Another artist that I have been looking at is Georgia Kopf-Reddmann, a German artist working with photography. Her work is simple and elegant and what I really find interesting isn't necessarily the photos themselves but the colors she captures and the ability to capture a mood. There are warm, cool, abrasive, and comforting images and I find myself completely relaxed as I scroll through photo after photo often going back to look at photos I have already seen.

Artist feedback (I will post the rest of everyones we didn't get to soon) Yet for now:

Dani: I loved your piece and I can tell that it was well thought out and delicately constructed. I think the relationship of a book to skin was a perfect comparison. I feel that often an underlying point or moral of a story does not surface until there is a hole created for it to ooze up and make contact with the reader, just as the underlying blood waits for its opportunity to rise to the surface with a prick or a cut. In a way I feel like skin is a book, it has remembrance in the form of burns, moles, scars, wrinkles. Similarly a story or book uses text to document the past or what has occurred. The piece was disturbing but in an intriguing and genuinely engaging way. I felt the need to touch it and digest all it had to say just as one would a book. <3

Alex: I don't know if this is appropriate or not, but 1) I am very proud of you, and 2) I can really see an underlying theme, idea, connection in your work. The idea of sheltering and home is apparent and also the idea of not knowing, just as the viewer was unsure of what lay within or around these strange "creatures", buildings, fungi, etc. I think this is fitting in your work, it seems like you enjoy addressing your need for control and your acceptance of your inability to control all things at all times. I also appreciated the duality in this piece... taking hard clay and giving it a soft, and wispy appearance. Also I enjoyed that you created an environment for what is essentially an environment itself. I have so much more to talk to you about concerning your future piece too... I think a lot of your ideas do run through all your work, you just don't realize it. Like doing pointless things to set your own mind at ease ( I am not being mean I love this). I don't want to give away what you are about to do so I will make sure I talk to you in person about this soon.

In general I was glad to get back into the swing of things with crit. I only have 2 more after all :( I want to savor them all.