Journey Through the Desert

As I have mentioned before, I am in the process of making a 10 piece collection. I have 2 pieces finished, 8 more to go. It's my first collection ever, and I am hand sewing everything, nothing it being touched by the machine...until further notice.



am pulling from many sources of inspiration for my designs/ photographs. The 3 main sources are Nico (Her life philosophy, and her album Desertshore), Freddy Krueger (Mainly the Nightmare on Elm Street 1,2,3,4 movie posters) and finally all things post apocalypse/ sci-fi. It is going to be a very raw collection that is all hand sewn and dysfunctional.



The piece you see here is a hooded poncho that took me about a month to make and edit, and months to plan a shoot. I used nothing but old fabrics from old clothes, design projects, and scraps. Nothing fresh. With them, I draped the pieces over my form, sewed them together creating a base. After making the structural components of this piece, I then added many many strips of different fabrics, textures, lengths, and widths. Adding and hand sewing each strip is very time consuming, and it's quite easy to get lost in a sea of fringe.



The poncho is a bit of a self portrait. As mentioned in my previous post, this has been a year like no other. I felt nomadic more or less. I was going from job to job to job to job, nothing was really consistent. Aside from that my boy friend of 5 years left me, causing me to withdraw from the world and begin on a new life journey and path to recreating my self and becoming an entirely different person. So the piece really reflects a time in my life, which is still happening. I just keep going, with out any place to really settle. You can view each strip as an event and the rawness as my emotions. I used a dark color palette consisting of deep purples, forest green, black, and some white.



To capture the feeling of time and weathering I spray painted and bleached various strips, creating a gradient and textural contrast.


On a more technical level, I was very lucky to have a friend of mine who is a professional make up artist come to my set and work her magic with my model. I spit words such as "alien, dead, volcanic, geometric" at her, and she rolled with the punches creating the face I wanted for the shoot.
I also decided to focus a little more on styling since my styling/ make up was pretty weak in my past shoots. That being said, using my Nightmare on Elm Street 4 movie poster inspiration, I created a hand piece/ weapon inspired by Freddy Krueger, but fit for a post apocalyptic nomad who hand makes her home, clothing, and weapons.





In picking a location, I decided to go for a very vast and open site reminiscent of Mars, Iceland, desert, of even the Moon. That being said I found a perfect construction site that provided me with everything I needed. I also wanted to use the sky and the rocks as back drops to my piece. I honestly believe this is my best photo shoot to date, and I hope that I can only continue to create these pieces and get better.