Meiyi Chen
Burden
Prompt: Create a weaving piece of art and be as creative as I want to be, inspired by a collage I made in seminar class, based on our personal stories.
This collage created for seminar class is named “Don’t Look At Me In That Way”, I aimed to express my complicated feeling of not being confident enough for my body wasn’t in the perfect shape in my culture, I wanted to express the side of me— which I never really know how to face and felt insecure about—by using various colors and overlapping images of me covering up my face with the only kind of garment I enjoyed wearing (berets) as an expression to show how all my emotions conflicted and interacts with one another. The materials I used were various yarns and beads from Micheals, ribbons from M&J, and balloons from Stop & Shop. For the weaving part, I did use other techniques, like weaving with chopsticks as a way to save budget, into the longer yarn ropes. I also applied wire into the pink yarn rope so anyone can modify it into the shape they want freely. I used balloons because we were encouraged to incorporate everything we wished to use, so I thought this would be a great metaphorical way to show that my heart, feeling mixed up and confused and shown in the centerpiece (woven with realheart references), could still not be set free even if I am feeling better, and had flee to the land of freedom, where balloons can fly high in ways not being criticized. While the other yarn components represented my fears and insecurities, like chains and in their own ways, still drags me down to the sad swamp of low confidence till today. This is also why I choose to take the picture indoors.