Shannon Murphy

This is some embroidery I did on underwear with body positive captions. I found this idea really fun and unique and possibly shocking to some viewers. The aim of this piece was to portray body positivity in another medium than painting or drawing on paper.

This a print of two bodies. I wanted to represent different shapes and size of bodies in another way other than drawing. I really like how these prints came out and I like how they may make the viewer stop and look and think.

This is a plaster cast I did of the silicon belly. I then scratched in words onto the surface. The words on the belly are body positive words and the words on the hands are body negative words

Back at the jigsaws again

I decided against another portrait and painting of the body and opted for a close up of stretchmarks overlay with a body positive caption.

I chose a jigsaw as a medium as I found the higher points and indentations in the pieces resemble the risen feeling of stretchmarks on the skin.

I wrote the caption “love every piece of you” on tracing paper and PVA glued it to the jigsaw puzzle. The pva glue gave the tracing paper some transluecency. The tracing paper and PVA glue also allowed for wrinkles in the paper which resemble both wrinkles in the skin and stretchmarks.

Following on from the portrait in my previous post, I recently came back to the exploration of acne. I also really wanted to experiment with some embroidery in the project.

These are some panels I did on wood with oil pastels. I am trying to draw a comparison between the ideal image of beauty- as represented by a Barbie doll, and natural beauty. I used different colors to highlight the stark difference between the two.

STEP 9: when the wax was completely solidified I removed the silicon and plaster bandage layers.

STEP 7: I covered the silicon in plaster bandage to give it a hard shell for support and shape.

STEP 5: Then I painted a second layer of silicon, to make a negative mould of the belly, over the already existing positive silicon cast. Once this negative mould is made in silicon I can then cast using any material, and cast many times without breaking the positive cast or negative mould.

STEP 3: I filled the wrist parts with clay before I put plaster bandage on the back of the silicon mould. I had to put plaster bandage on back of silicon mould to give it structure and a solid shape, otherwise the silicone would just be floppy. The wrist parts had to be filled with clay as the would be to intricate for the plaster bandage, and would break.

3D OF MY BELLY

STEP 1: I made a plaster bandage mould of my belly with my friend’s help (but unfortunately I lost the photo)

This is some of the work I did in the making of my zine.

I first drew out rough sketches of my illustrations on to card.

Then, I traced over the refined finished illustration onto tissue paper using a black pen.

Finally, I lay the tissue paper over the blank zine book, and using a pen, drew over my illustrations with pressure so to leave an indented line in the zine of my illustrations.

I then traced over these indentations with a black pen to give a nice, clean black line.