SOUVENIR
SHOP 🌎
Location contributes an immense amount to how we grow up, develop and feel in the world. It shapes culture, behavior and preferences for everyone, everywhere. Although we don't necessarily choose where we grow up, we carry the lessons learned from those places throughout our entire lives. As we travel and explore the world, we see how different people communicate and live their lives - it opens our minds to things that we never thought were possible. As travel has been limited during the current era, we have felt more deeply the importance of our own homes and craved to get out into the world again and experience other places. All this to say, location plays a significant role in our lives.
Souvenirs are physical objects that often represent places or memories but often fall short of encapsulating the essence of a location. The prompt was to elevate the souvenir through storytelling, process, materiality etc. How can the souvenir be rethought, simplified or enhanced?
Please enjoy our presentation of the Souvenir Shop.
About a 4 hour drive from where I grew up, the landscape is painted in red dust. Moab Utah is a gritty place often leaving with you on your shoes. The local cars seem to have a permanent coating of the stuff.
Prehistoric in nature, the landscape gives you a glimpse of time within its layers exposed by the beating of the harsh desert weather. Carved by The Mother, the greatest of all designers, her mark lives in the towering walls that engulf you when you stand at the foot of them. This place has a particular texture about it, a story that it tells through the grit of its surfaces. I wanted to capture that texture in this object.
In order to preserve the ecological system, I mined raw clay from the side of the road in Moab, already altered by the pilgrimage of people who come to worship this grand cathedral. Wetting, drying, sifting, wetting again, sifting again, I was able to get a fine enough particulate that could fire and produce lasting results. A plaster cast was made and the clay was mixed into a slip. I experimented with innovating techniques before landing on a process that created what you see, a texture to mimic Moab itself. Something that could carry with it a part of this foreign world.
Credit to Stone Anderson for guidance on the production.
Prehistoric in nature, the landscape gives you a glimpse of time within its layers exposed by the beating of the harsh desert weather. Carved by The Mother, the greatest of all designers, her mark lives in the towering walls that engulf you when you stand at the foot of them. This place has a particular texture about it, a story that it tells through the grit of its surfaces. I wanted to capture that texture in this object.
In order to preserve the ecological system, I mined raw clay from the side of the road in Moab, already altered by the pilgrimage of people who come to worship this grand cathedral. Wetting, drying, sifting, wetting again, sifting again, I was able to get a fine enough particulate that could fire and produce lasting results. A plaster cast was made and the clay was mixed into a slip. I experimented with innovating techniques before landing on a process that created what you see, a texture to mimic Moab itself. Something that could carry with it a part of this foreign world.
Credit to Stone Anderson for guidance on the production.