Jacqueline Wagner
Untitled
Prompt: This project focused on exploring my own story. Through writing and making, I examined how my personal experiences and memories have shaped me as a creator. Working from my own perspective, I asked myself: What moments from my past influence the way I see the world and make creative choices today? This was an opportunity to practice close observation—of myself, my surroundings, daily habits, and patterns of thinking. By reflecting on how my understanding has evolved from early memories to who I am now, I created physical work that revealed the connection between my personal history and creative identity.
I wanted to produce something that was both inspired by and captured the wonder of an important memory: the day I got glasses and felt as though I saw the world for the first time. Specifically, the image of clearly seeing leaves on trees, the subsequent realization of how intricately beautiful the world is, and a surge of inspiration because of that. I was also inspired by Agnes Varda’s autobiographical film “The Beaches of Agnes,” where she says that “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” I agree, and believe that those landscapes are most often the landscapes of your childhood. This inspired me to incorporate nature into my Bridge 1 that reflected how sentimental I feel towards the landscapes both within and surrounding me.
I decided to create flowers out of wax, done so by dipping my fingers first in cold water and then in hot wax before attaching them to a branch. After a few seconds, my fingers would part easily from the wax mold that remained, a shape very reminiscent of flower petals. Significant here is the fact that each flower petal is embedded with my own fingerprint, connecting the piece to my identity.
I wanted to keep the base organic as a tie to nature as the flowers themselves are inorganic. I decided to gather my branches from Tompkins Square Park, as I spent a lot of time there while writing my application essays for Parsons and found a lot of inspiration from the elements within the park. To me, it signifies that this first project at Parsons is a kind of building block connecting where I have come from to what I will create, binding my organic inner landscape to my man-made inorganic work.