Julia Lohmann gave us a lecture about her work and her current projects she's working on and afterwards spoke to us all individually about our work, giving us feedback on where she thought we could expand and develop. She was particularly helpful in giving me ideas on how I could take the origami to the next level in ways which I hadn't considered and gave me a lot of ideas on furthering my work.
During her lecture she showed us images of her work and videos she had made. A lot of her work is concerned with the preservation of natural forms and with challenging peoples boundaries and perceptions between art and revulsion. She has done quite a lot of work around how people treat beef and leather as separate, unrelated by-products to a cow and has made a series of cow benches using a single whole hide of leather to cover a cow shaped form. Another project she did focused on the voids left when a cow is slaughtered and all its organs are removed. She cast molds of it by pouring plaster into it and finally creating a resin and fibreglass form of this void which would otherwise be quickly be lost after the end of the cows life. She has also done projects around preserving sheep stomachs, maggots, sweet teeth, aliens and Japanese fish crates, one I was particularly interested in is a series she is currently working on around kelp and how it can be manipulated. The picture above is of one of her experimental lamps made from kelp where it is wrapped around wooden legs, I like the use of light in the piece and how more of the kelp constructs can be added to dim the light. She is exploring the potential of kelp as a design material and has also turned it into a laminating material, the colours from the kelp range from deep browns to light greens and would provide a cheaper alternative to wood laminates.
When I spoke to Julia about my project she suggested looking into ways I could make it my own, possibly through creating my own origami patterns or by allowing the user to be able to customise the form, either through using drawstrings or different cutting and folding patterns. She also suggested looking at different materials which could add value to the piece but also to think more about what I could package. I'd like the origami to be customisable but from further research I feel that a folding pattern would be too complicated and that the origami would be more valuable if already formed and that materials could play a large part in it.
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