Untitled (Sabine)
Wood, thread, sugar, candles, wax, loose-leaf tea, vintage jewelry, acrylic paint, battery-powered string lights, charcoal, coffee grounds, needles, and wire all inside a 7" x 8.5" x 2" box ・ Completed February 2019

This project was the result of a group assignment in my first-year studio class at Parsons School of Design. For this assignment, we worked in a group to craft characters and a story that we would use to inform an art piece. We interviewed strangers at Grand Central Station and combined different elements of their life stories to create our character – a young medical student (Sabine) who fell in love with a baker, their story set during the New York blackout of 1977. (If you're interested in reading the writing portion I did for this project inspired by these characters, you can find it here.) I was inspired by the contrast between the two characters’ settings – the clash between the sweetness and softness of a bakery and the sharp sterility of medical tools.

My group members and I all played very similar and equal roles in creating this. We all shopped for materials together, brainstormed, and contributed ideas. I was responsible for some preliminary sketches. Two pieces of jewelry featured are mine -- I chose them as they were my grandmother’s, and one of the women we interviewed was an older lady who happened to have the same name as me, which made me want to include something that felt like it could both apply to our character and also exist as a connection between strangers. In physically creating it, we all had a hand -- all worked on painting the box, attaching the threads and lights, crafting different elements, and arranging our focal pieces.