Sunday, April 01, 2007

Stuffed Self-Portrait

For an appropriation project I created a stuffed-animal self-portrait out of my old clothes. I was going for cute and cuddly but ended up with creepy and odd, as usual. I plan to make more of these, of the people I know, from their old clothes.










6 comments:

Tom Beckett said...

This is wonderful work. I look forward to seeing more examples.

Ryan MacDonald said...

Thanks very much Tom, more examples to come soon.

Anonymous said...

Ryan -- looks like a quilt corpse. Evokes the image of old women sitting around this big corpse, making it somehow into a quilt. If old women could make the man of their dreams quilt-style it couldn't live. It'd be a quilt corpse.

Ryan MacDonald said...

Interestingly enough Bill, after I made the stuffed figure I was looking through art history slides and found Katharina Detzel with self-made figure, 1914. She was institutionalized in Germany for schizophrenia. Apparently she did exactly that, quilted the man of her dreams.

Here is a link to her image:

http://animulavagula.hautetfort.com
/images/medium_Katharina_Detzel.2.jpg

Anonymous said...

very beautiful very poignant.
sarahp

Anonymous said...

You can see the logo of Katharina D. here.