Olivia Schott
Beauty is Pain
Prompt: For this project, we had to create a soft sculpture and expand upon an idea presented in our bridge one project.
This mask is about the extreme beauty standards society puts on women and how I as a women am affected by it. I had to use objects I chose for a previous project and connect them to myself in some way, that is where the lipsticks around my neck come in. I wanted to make them into a choker in order to symbolize that such beauty standards can be suffocating at some point. I hand sewed the entire piece myself and set up the photo shoot/edited the photos with the help of my friend. I wanted to combine my usual art style (somewhat pop-art and contemporary) with a more lavish almost victorian art style. In the beginning I was planning on making the piece more realistic however as I went I decided on making it more abstract. I was hoping to make it a bit unsettling to look at because that’s how such standards make me feel, and I feel like I achieved that. In the end I am very proud of how it came out.