well, schoolwork is officially over for the semester. only four exams until i can bask in all of summer's glory carefree of academia. which also means only four semesters until summer will no longer be the oasis i've always known it to be...i'll be a college gratuate working in the real world. so maybe posting my feature story is a copout for writing an actual post, but i'm doing it anyway. (gauche is a type of paint, by the way)Glitter is a nemesis to a mother who doesn’t literally want her home to be “sparkling” clean. Claire Joyce’s mother doesn’t like messes. If a mess is sure to be made, the activity requires strict supervision and special measures taken to contain it.
But last fall, Joyce got the glitter out without her mother’s permission. She sprinkled the sparkly substance onto the table, not taking any precautions to keep the messy material in check. Twenty years ago her mother would have been horrified.
But this dabble with glitter was not simply to make a pink, sparkly nametag for her bedroom door. Joyce was sprinkling and gluing together her final project—now on display in the Master of Fine Arts Exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art.
The 28-year-old Midwest native developed her love for art, especially crafts, at an early age. Many children create finger paintings and crayon scribbles to put on their parents’ fridge, but their careers as artists are typically short lived. However, Joyce’s career has gone far beyond the childhood years spent beading, sewing, knotting, drawing, cross-stitching and paper snowflake snipping, leading her to the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Georgia.
When she arrived a few years ago, Joyce’s specialty was in fabrics. However, an experimental venture outside of her typical medium changed the direction of her final exhibition project from cotton and dye to glitter and glue.
“Last semester, we were doing a show at a steakhouse and I thought, ‘How funny would it be if I did a steak in glitter?’” Joyce laughed. That was the beginning of her love affair with glitter.
And so Joyce began the experiment, inspired by the sparkle of her own creativity. She invented techniques for the new style, working in small sections at a time, delicately sprinkling glitter and using a paintbrush to apply glue in detailed areas. She hinged the 8-foot by 3-foot panels to a table so she could easily flip the artwork over and dump the excess glitter to the floor.
Like her fellow graduate students, Joyce had her own studio space where she spent days and nights, her only company being numerous canisters of glitter ordered online in bulk and her beloved iPod.
“It was a time consuming, slow process,” Joyce recalled. “I would go into my studio, put on my iPod headphones and listen to the audio book
This American Life on repeat for 14 hours a day, six days a week, for four weeks.”
And she was only estimating the time it took for a single one of the three panels.
If asked how many cans of glitter comprised the entire 8-foot by 12-foot trio, the deliberation expressed on Joyce’s face would look as if the question was how many specks of glitter are there.
The sparkle from Joyce’s masterpiece, titled
Quarter Life Crisis, immediately captures the eye of Georgia Museum visitors.
The finished work resembles stained glass windows of gothic cathedrals. Though they may shimmer like stained glass, these panes do not illustrate the biblical stories of the saints, but an autobiography of Joyce’s life.
Progressing from infancy to adulthood, Joyce is nude in all the three illustrations, which dominate the center of the compositions. Bordering the central images are objects and scenes from various places, ranging from crayons, Polaroid pictures and beer cans to frolicking deer and Waffle Houses.
While most of the imagery bordering the central image of each panel is pulled from Joyce’s foggy childhood memories, many observers apply their own interpretations of Joyce’s work.
“I teach a learning and retirement course on the Old Testament and I was thinking about referencing this work because it represents a wonderful kind of Eve figure of today,” viewer Sam Carleton said of the second panel, which depicts Joyce indulging in the forbidden fruit as a snake twists around her leg. “It’s a beautiful blend of the culture of today mixed with culture of the past.”
Viewers also examine the artwork as if they are reading Joyce’s personal diary and attempt to interpret the underlying message about her life.
“A security woman at the museum came up to me the other day and told me that she had figured it all out,” Joyce said. “A lot of people like to guess. But for the people who know me well, the imagery is obvious.”
Joyce will continue to create her glitter paintings unsupervised. And despite the mess that’s made, her mother is extremely proud.
a sketch of Joyce's painting
to record things right. heck, why not just say i'm a red head? he couldn't even get the color of the car right. perhaps i can argue my $120 ticket in court, saying that the man is blind? yes?
