The theme for today's workshop was using gender specific toys and creating a sculpture by experimenting with intricate dissection and reconstruction of children’s toys to create a gender-neutral sculpture. Well this is what I took from it. It dawned on me whilst experimenting with this; just how many toys are gender-specific. What if boys actually do like purple unicorns and girls like dinosaurs? I love both, as I'm sure most children would love both if the media weren’t so forthcoming with stereotyping toys into genders. I'd love to develop this further and create a bigger piece with more research into how tradition, culture and heritage has depicted that children should play with gender specific toys and how the media has reinforced these existing paradigms. It is so prevalent in society that the effects can be seen long before modern media existed.
This was a fun workshop! Katy and myself went to town on some dinosaurs, a unicorn, a soft toy and a toy car. It was a great experience, dissecting and dissembling the toys with a saw and screwdriver and using a glue gun to reassemble parts together. It felt liberating ripping the unicorns head off and sawing up the dinosaurs, like we were really going against the grain and thinking right outside of the box. Which is my favourite thing to do!
We did think about spray-painting the finished design in a colour; however we stayed with the original mixture of colour in the toys as this was a strong statement of their origin which helped to promote to contrast and display the objective of the product. I feel the colour contrast worked really well because it showed the differentiation between the 4 toys and their original gender, thus capturing the essence of not stereotyping into ‘gender-norms’. It is most certainly an abstract sculpture that challenges thinking and societal norms. The recycling of these toys was the source of inspiration as well as comprising the materials for the artwork.
I would definitely like to take this theme further, build a bigger sculpture and see how far and where I could go with the research around the psychology of how it can effect children's development when parents typically buy boys trucks and girls dolls. I feel it can also be an important indicator of what skills young children are acquiring as they play, and of whether their academic and professional horizons are comparatively wide — or whether they are already starting to rule things out for themselves. I’d love to explore and portray this using a wide range of different styles and recycled materials.
Artist Spotlight ~ Freya Jobbins
Freya Jobbins, is a South African born, contemporary Australian artist based near Sydney, her practice includes assemblage, installation, collage and printmaking. Freya also creates larger site specific installations and sculptures. In Freya's own words "My work is based on appropriation, re-assemblage and subversion of pre-existent objects, where I continue to explore notions of identity, motifs and my own dissimulation. With a focus on technical craftsmanship through intricate dissection and reconstruction of the humanoid face using recognisable toys in my assemblages."
Freya is an unconventional contemporary artist and has been active since 2007.
I find this artist interesting because of the way she uses discarded children's toys to create unique and intricate sculptures that tackle the consumerist fixation of our society and our obsession with the superficial. She has a strong ethos of up-cycling and sustainability and this is something I admire.
The images above relate to my theme because to me, they are genderless sculptures using the stereotypical 'male' and 'female' toys. Freya describes her work 'Agapi Trigono', (meaning love triangle in Greek) as an attempt to interpret the human story via Greek Mythology. In the first piece on the left is Zeus, King of the Gods, standing between his wife Hera and the beautiful young male Ganymede, one of Zeus's many lovers. It is an intimate conversation which the artist describes as being dominated by anger, adulation and self-absorption. However I don't feel, looking them that they even have a gender.
This artist works from observation of photographs and drawings of the human body and imagination when bringing these sculptures to life. Each piece is original and can take months and sometimes years, to create. From the conception of each piece, to the hours spent sourcing the materials, to the work of piecing it all together, layer upon layer, adding form and depth, the hours involved are mind blowing. Her work is intriguing to me as I really feel strongly about consumerism and she has an amazing work ethos.
When I first looked at her work I was pulled in by the eye for detail she has. I love the use of symmetry and mathematical precision. She has used barbies legs for hair, dolls heads for a stomach tissue, barbies faces for the neck and the list goes on! She has created different textures and skin tones by layering up using different coloured doll parts and I actually feel a little uneasy looking at some of the faces she has created as they look quite alien like. You can clearly see in her sculptures the sheer volume of toys that have been unloved or thrown away, which emphasises the problem of consumerism.
My exploration during the toys workshop links to this artist because I have used the same materials of recycled and discarded toys. I would love to take inspiration from Jobbin's work and create my own bigger scale sculpture, combating the challenges of gender norms in a way that speaks to an audience and make them think twice about buying and discarding gender specific toys. I would take this further by creating a sculpture, half male using female specific toys and half female using male specific toys. Freya addresses silent and secretive human truths in our intimate relationships and with ourselves and I feel that people don't look at or realise what their ingrained belief systems are when it comes to gender and how I find even myself putting toys into gender categories, when really, it's wrong.
Comments