Summer plans

This summer I plan to explore feminine issues through making adornment for the body. I am going to try to use alternate materials as a base for my beadwork, as well as create pieces that are quick sketches of things I may do in the future. I am going to try and update this blog once a week on Thursdays, so that I can record my process and progress through what I am working on. We'll see how that goes!

End of the semester wrap up

Here is the work I did this semester accompanied by my artist statement and a video of these pieces being performed: 

My work is based heavily on ritual. According to Walter Benjamin, the advent of photography freed the work of art from ritual, as it made everything reproducible and therefore inauthentic. I find it hard to separate artwork from its history of ritual, and believe that it doesn’t need freed from it. Art comes from every day ritual, whether it be photography or the creation of objects. It comes from inside of a person, and from this person’s interests. Interests become ritual; they become something thought about and seen everywhere, and then looked for everywhere. Ingrained in art is ritual, whether that art it reproduced or not.

This body of work explores ritual in an every-day context. I started this work by exploring cultural rituals that people do every day without thinking why they do them. This led me to explore coming of age rituals. By exploring these topics, I came to the conclusion that ritual is important because of a craving of familiarity. Humans stick to repetitive, ritualistic, habitual behaviors because they are comfortable. These behaviors, though comforting, feed into the restrictions that we put on ourselves in our daily lives.

Carmen Smith is an MFA candidate at Columbus College of Art and Design. She received her BFA in jewelry an metals at Bowling Green State University in 2012.