Artist Statement
My life has been built upon stories and imagination. This being the reason my portfolio is based upon fairy tales. Each piece explores the overall theme of time. Time never stops moving no matter how much we want it to pause. In each of the stories retold in my pieces, time plays an important role. In addition to exploring the concept of time, I also added the aspect of imagination in each piece. Growing up, everyone’s childhood was filled with beauty and imagination. To a child, anything is possible because of their never ending imagination. As you grow up, your imagination becomes less influential and you begin to focus on reality. Growing up is also realizing the morals of these nostalgic fairy tales. As children all fairy tales seemed so perfect in every way. Taking a deeper look into these stories showed me the darker side to the fairy tales and the morals taught in each. My hope for this portfolio is to take you back to your childhood imagination to help you remember the stories that inspired you as a child. Hopefully you can relate and see the importance of imagination in each piece. I used crochet to tell the stories, because just like a story unravels, yarn unravels into something beautiful. I paid close attention to detail in each of my pieces to show the importance of small elements and details in fairy tales. The intent of my portfolio is to also portray a sense of mystery and unknown from these known fairy tales. There is always a deeper, more significant meaning behind stories, and through my crochet, viewers will be able to open their eyes and see the wonder of imagination through these stories.
“White Winter Hymnal,” has a deeper meaning than just lambs walking through the snow. It’s a tribute to soldiers who died in war. The red scarves falling in the snow symbolize the blood of the soldiers. “White Winter Hymnal” is a beautiful song, but the lyrics are very vague, leaving it up to the audience to decipher the true meaning of the song. This crocheted piece is a small interpretation of what is imagined when listened to the story told through this song. To create this piece, I crocheted a red scarf and took a close up photograph of it in the snowy weather. I am very pleased with how this piece turned out. It's by far one of my favorites because of how deep the story is and how much the red scarf stands out from everything else.
One of my favorite fairy tales as a child was Beauty & the Beast. I loved the way how an ordinary girl fell in love with a beast who became her prince charming. In this piece the delicacy and symbolic meaning of the rose in this well known story is captured. Crochet is such a simple, yet beautiful form of art. I recreated the rose using yarn, to portray the fragility of the rose. In the story, the rose is the reason the prince lived half his life as a beast. Time was bound to wither the rose till nothing was left. To create this piece, I crocheted each rose petal and sewed them together to create the full piece. Then I wrapped yarn around a wooden stick as the stem, and crocheted a base atop the stem holding the green leaves. This piece is bright and beautiful, but I wish I constructed the rose to be stronger, because it is very delicate, which made it hard to position it in the pictures I took without damaging it.
Alice in Wonderland was such a whimsical story that inspired every young child to have an imagination. This clock is crocheted to show how time passes, and no one is ever too old to have an imagination. Growing up, everyone learns that there are expectations to meet and high standards forcing conformity to society. It’s important to keep a creative imagination and a sense of wonder no matter age. Time passes differently in this fairytale, but in reality, time will never slow down. This piece took by far the longest to create due to the detail in it. Just embroidering the numbers took about an hour to create, since I wanted them to be even and equally spaced out.
This next piece was inspired by the Halloween story, “Coraline.” In this story, Coraline rescues other ghost children from her “Other Mother.” In this piece I buttons were included in a small box to symbolize Coraline collecting the buttons from other children. The yarn wrapped around sticks in the background symbolizes the two realities Coraline travels between. It’s up for interpretation for the audience to connect their life to this piece and determine how their world is split in two and sometimes it feels as if the meaning of life is living in two realities. This piece also explores the depths of imagination bleeding into reality. This piece is slightly different from my others. It's darker and instead of incorporating crochet directly into it, I used the materials I use to crochet to create something else. One aspect of this piece that I love is how simple this piece is, yet how complicated it is as well.
This piece is a small representation of the effects of rain in stories. Storms always have an everlasting effect of the plots of stories. The intention of this piece was to find a similarity between all stories to tie everything together. A story isn’t complete without a situation that changes the entirety of the plot and makes the reader rethink every aspect of the story. Though rain usually symbolizes a bad situation, this piece explores the peace and silence in a rainstorm. Each raindrop is suspended in a moment of peace. This piece is also simple compared to some of the others, but it also has a very peaceful effect. If I were to change this piece I would crochet raindrops using a thinner string, so they're more intricate.
This piece inspired by the Disney movie “Up,” portrays the beauty in the balloons. “Up” based in Tepuis Venezuela is a story about a man who has a dream of exploring Paradise Falls someday. Imagination ties this portfolio together and is the main factor of this piece. No one can ever be too old to make dreams come true. Through this piece the beauty of living through wonder and how imagination never expires is conveyed. My hope for this piece is for the audience to remember childhood memories when seeing this piece. This sculpture is also one of my favorites I created, since it incorporated crochet as well as painting.
Credits:
©Calia Lopez