This project was assigned over Passover—one of my favorite holidays. So naturally, it worked its way into my project. I decided to hand make a book of the 10 plagues. Each page would be a new plague. I also decided to hand make the binding and cover.

The cover is in Hebrew and says “Ten Plagues.” Then, at the bottom, it says my name in Hebrew. Each page is meant to give some kind of visual representation of the plagues. I added the names of each plague in Hebrew and also placed an English translation (there is some argument as to the fourth plague so I made both translations work).

I remember while making this I got matzah crumbs everywhere and I was listening to The Prince of Egypt’s soundtrack on repeat and singing along loudly.

Here is a breakdown of the meaning of each plague page:

1. The blood unfolds out of the page in a shocking and flowing amount.
2. The frog is a pop-out, meant to add to the “AAH!” quality of the plague.
3. The sheer number of the lice in the third plague was meant to add to the horror.
4. The open jaw and pop out teeth are meant to be striking, surrounded by flies (the other possible translation) to aid in a suffocating effect.
5. The skeleton of a cow to represent the death of livestock.
6. This one is fairly self-explanatory: I gave the page pop-out boils.
7. Hail rains down, even past the pages. I did this with thread. They drop out when the page is opened.
8. The close up of locusts, once again for the “AAH!” effect—although they are sort of cute.
9. I made this page just full of the dark paper. I have fold outs that extend the darkness of the page to make it more all-encompassing. Then in the middle, in tinier letters than usual is the label.
10. The tenth plague is the one that I made a little more simply, due to the really somber nature of the “slaying of the first born.” I just added a pair of wings to represent the angle of death and put red paint around the edges of the pages to represent the lamb’s blood on the doors to keep that plague out.

This was my original sketch of ideas:

In this project, our finished art had to be controlled partly by a system. I came up with an idea to use the piano. I will attach a sheet explaining the system and the rules in a much more detailed way, but the main idea was about turning my family’s names into music and improvising a song out of it.

I used the A minor scale since that, like the alphabet, started on A. Then I separated all the letters into one of the seven different notes in that scale. Spelling out each name gave me different melodies to work with. I wrote down the notes for each name and improvised a song that used all of the progressions at least once and interwove them.

I didn’t allow myself to plan how they would go together before starting the piece. The video is the finished product.

This project was about a particular emotion. It was supposed to capture that emotion in an abstract way. We could use any materials we wanted.

The emotion I chose was “longing.”

I will attach an image of the original sketch and notes. When I thought of longing, I thought of how at the center of the emotion is this reaching out toward whatever it is that one is longing for. That is why in the center there is a spiraling arm reaching up. The circle of overlapping, bridge-like arms was meant to represent the excitement that comes from thinking about what one might long for. The reason that the different parts are all swirling in some way is a little harder to explain. I just felt like the emotion I chose was not a very static one—it has movement.

Orange was the natural color of the clay. I chose to highlight the edges of the sculpture in the complementary color to show the edges better, since it would only be seen in photographs. I wanted the curves to come through clearly.

This project was about mail art. Since the last few semesters have been completely online and, in general, COVID has kept people at a distance, sending art through the mail was especially relevant.

I made three separate post card-like mail pieces:

1. Since this project was related to the ongoing pandemic, I made that the subject of my first card. I stitched different colored threads all starting from where I am now, and going to the different places in the US where I have close family that I haven’t been able to see in a year because of the pandemic. Then around the silhouette of the country, I pasted CDC guidelines.
2. The second card was for my sister-in-law’s graduation from college. She didn’t get to walk or have family there because of COVID so I sent a little celebration in the mail.
3. Finally, I made a card with the sketches of some of the types of birds that are outside of the window where I take my Zoom classes (my only in person classmates).

All of them were mailed.

I will never take looking at my pencil as I draw for granted again. We came to class (on Zoom, of course) on one of the first days and had exercises where the professor would give us a picture to draw. The catch was, it was blind line art, so you can’t look at your hand as you draw.

As you can imagine, most of the times I looked down in horror to see what I had drawn when I finished the earliest sketches–which were flowers, a tree…etc. They were…interesting. But as we continued, I got more used to it and the finished products turned out better. I wound up liking the simple, minimalistic, sometimes abstract effect of the drawings from this technique.

Eventually, we drew ourselves from a mirror, and it turned out to look very interesting. After the drawing in pen was made, we then rendered the line in wire. I put the wire against black for the first photo for contrast, and in the second photo, against the wall to get a shadow.