(I added “part 1” because this post is about an on going mammoth of a series, so there are bound to be twists and turns)

After the Fever Dream Series sort of ended (maybe it’s just taking a little break until it comes back for round two with the second wave of the virus) I started working on freeform pieces again, but this time restricting the size, so that all the pieces would have roughly the same dimensions.

The reason I did that was because during the quarantine we were playing a-lot of cards, I love playing cards and hardly ever find anyone who is willing to play for hours on end, which was ultimately what stopped the card playing altogether in our house. I find that my somewhat obsessive brain loves repetitive things, whatever the action is, it becomes a meditative exercise and it calms everything right the fuck down. Plus, when I play cards, trash talk just pours out of me, it’s very fun.

After finding myself sans card playing partner, I thought it would be kinda nice to create images for a deck of cards, and so began the latest series which is still in progress and not yet on the website. It’s currently being posted on my instagram and as you can see I also added some sneaky previews in this post. Btw, hit me up if you are not on instagram and want to know more about them.

The deck of cards began from K, Q and J cards because, in a book about the history of fashion, I found different same sized female floating heads. I thought it would be cool to make an entirely female deck of cards since the material seemed to be pointing in that direction, but like in many many books, ethnicities other than white/caucasian are severely under/misrepresented, which I decided would have to be reworked around the deck from A to 10.

At the moment all of K, Q, and J are done, they all have more or less the same kind of lady face with different elements around their heads making up for symbolic bodies. The Aces are also already done, and they are already slightly different from de K, Q and Js because the compositions around the heads are hardly bodies, even if symbolic ones, they are closer to representing a context, a whole, everything from macro to micro, even if on a less super saturated construction style.

Since we are talking about construction, I decided when I started working on this deck (which might end up as something else entirely, but right now this is the line that I’m following down the rabbit hole) that I would have all the pieces be a certain max size and be of a certain complexity that I could create at least one per day. Of course, this is no exact science so there have been pieces where I lingered on for 3 – 4 days, and some that just seem to pop up on their own in a few hours. The possibly interesting side of this is that just looking at the pieces you wouldn’t be able to know which took more time.

During the quarantine I tried planting some stuff, and it was enlightening to see how seeds from the same bag, given the same terrible chance to live as I am not a gardener, would develop in completely different times and paces, from overachievers to ones that never even sprouted. Some took weeks to catch up to the early bloomers, others died before ever getting close. I can see that in my work sometimes, I can see that in people around me and if you are prone to anxiety and depression it’s very tempting to wonder where on the bean sprouting scale you find yourself in, until you are ultimately confronted with the more problematic reality that you would not be able to grow your own food if it ever came to that.

I have not been sharing these posts properly because I want to feel safer about their continuation before adding more pressure to this still naked and blind puppy of an attempt, I changed analogies from beans to puppies, but you get it(?).

Thank you for being here.
All the best always. See you next post. :)

News from the apocalypse II (part 1)

News from the apocalypse I