I began this project by making soft sculptures inspired by Yayoi Kusama. Kusama made soft, phallic shaped sculptures because she was terrified of sex and filling a room with these soft objects was a way of softening the experience. I wanted to continue exploring softness, thinking about the ways we soften everyday experience.
I came up with a list of experiences and their ‘soft’ counter parts: vaping instead of smoking, using a self-checkout machine instead of talking to a cashier and texting someone instead of speaking to them.
I initially experimented with taking my soft sculptures (made out of pillow stuffing and charity shop clothes) into spaces that I considered ‘soft’ or in which soft experiences happened like my bedroom, a bathroom and the grocery store.
However, I felt that by taking the sculptures into these different spaces it distracted from soft experience and made the focus of the piece the space, so I opted for staying in the studio.
I chose to investigate texting instead of speaking, making a duvet of a screenshot of a dm I sent to a random girl on Instagram 2ish years ago. The text was a poem written by AI and I think it’s a good example of how much you can distance yourself from real communication or connection with someone while still technically communicating.
I constructed the screenshot with pipe-cleaners and felt, extending the softness of the sculptures to the words to suggest the idea that the words themselves are not important, but rather that the focus of the piece is softness.
For a title I was thinking ‘You want me, right?’, which I like because think that’s something I can only imagine someone saying online, the ultimate soft space.