In this two years, I built up new myself from jewelry worker who lack of thoughts to a more mature designer. I was growing up by exploring art through salt in this journey. And depend on salt, combined with my personal experiences and psychological theories, I intended to create an art method to express and heal trauma. Those skills I have got in this process will keep helping me in my later art creating.
At beginning of this project, when I haven’t make decision on salt, I found out of my goal through two questions, if jewelry can be the representative of human emotion And if human emotion can be expressed by materials. After almost one month of researching and trying to answer, with the guiding by my instructor, I determined to explore salt as my main project direction to seek the answers of the questions.
In my first step, I found the method of forming salt sculpture without glue through plenty of experiments. Since then I created a few rough salt art wares. In the first program submission, I found my insufficient when I was asked about the meaning behind my works. Thus, thinking about the deep meanings behind my works turned to my main focus in next step. On my way to explore and research the theoretical foundation of my work, I experimented about reactions between salt and other materials, expanded the opportunities of my salt project, and gathered many information of psychotherapy and childhood trauma. In the second program submission, via comprehensive applications of what I have learned last days, I finished my first relatively complete work which was a combination of iron wires and salt flakes with a meaning, expressing and healing childhood trauma, behind. After the criticizing, I came up my new direction of salt, which is to explore a feeling of constraint in the image of link chain. the process of exploring salt gave me a deeper understanding about this material in order to freely using it, and gave me more experiences in creating wearable sculpture.
In addition, in the researching of healing trauma, I got inspiration from British writer Jeanette Winterson. In her autobiography, she mentioned ‘using the pain of the wound to heal others, the wound become its own salve.’ I learned to put my experiences into art making to heal myself and others. And also in the research of psychology, I begin to interest in the area of art design psychology and art therapy.
In the future, I am going to suspend my salt project for a while, however I will keep using what I got in the study of salt, which are research methods, craft skills, critical thinking. In my further plan, I am going to keep leaning the skills of art creation industry and accumulating experiences In my work and spare time, in order to seek my next art goal. I was keeping thinking about my own design accessories brand and I will keep doing that, hoping one day it can implement.