Hannah Yao
Shell for a Fragile Heart
Class of: 2027
Major: Product Design BFA
Medium: Chipboard, Wire, Acrylic Paint, Spray Paint
Faculty: Aviva Maya Shulem
Prompt: We were tasked with developing a body part cover inspired by exoskeleton anatomy that explored forms of protecting ourselves from physical or metaphorical things.
This piece is an exoskeleton chest piece that protects the heart of the wearer not only physically but emotionally. I spent time dry brushing paint onto the chest piece after spray painting it in order to make it look more battered. A big priority for me with this piece was to make it out of one connected piece of chipboard; since we could not use glue I didn’t want to have a lot of pieces that I would have piece together. I played around with the form of it a lot using my sketch model and ended up with a design that I could cut out as one piece, score, and fold together kind of like origami or cardboard boxes.