I recently watched a documentary called 'Dior and I' about designer Raf Simons and his first haute couture show. In it, Simons said something like, "I don't like to romanticize the past, but I like to romanticize the future."
Boom. That was it for me, inspiration.
I don't know about you, but I’m tired of feeling anxious and negative towards the future. It feels like no matter where we look, the narrative about the future is frankly kind of scary. It's either something about how technology is going to take over humanity, or how we're all going to be too obsessed with social media to be able to look up from our phones and make any real connections. The outlook from an environmental perspective, to the social justice perspective, to the political agenda is just really, really bleak.
I'm sick of it. I don't understand how so many people can contribute to this negative narrative, but then again when the narrative catches, it becomes trendy and then forget about it. There isn't anything out there that says something good.
So that's what I want to do. I want to fall in love with the future. I want to create work that reflects that notion of falling in love. We have the opportunity to make something good of our futures, and art has the power to bring up that topic. I'm ready to imagine something beautiful and lovely and wonderful.
For my first pair of earrings, I want to explore what romance looks like so I chose a stage of the romantic love story: starry-eyed.
I couldn't bring myself to making stars and moons, that seems too predictable. Then as I was searching for another star form, I fell upon the Islamic geometric star patterns. I don't want to imitate that, but I do love how Islamic art uses geometry to idealize paradise. They believe that paradise/heaven is all about order, structure, and perfection. Since I'm idealizing the future, I wanted to use that concept of structure, order, geometry but I have to do it my own way.
I stumbled upon a piece of pyrite in my studio and it clicked. I wanted to model these earrings after the pyrite cubes so I began sawing an 'L' shape and folding it to make a 3-sided cube. This creates facets which brings in and reflects as much light as possible, another feeling on my list for how I want the future to feel like.
I was inspired by pyrite because this mineral is representative of our longing for abundance. Fool’s Gold, another name for pyrite, is less a stone about deception but rather symbolizes what we truly want: for our cups to overflow.
That's all for today, have a lovely day and thanks so much for reading.
Stay well,
Caitlin