Emily Peters and Yinka Orafidiya, Collaborative Sculpture Exhibit

 Emily Peters                                                              







Yinka Orafidiya                                                                       

Collaborative Proposal

In response to the question "Who is the 99%?” artists Emily Peters and Yinka Orafidiya would like to present a collaborative artwork.

    

Every individual in the 99% has a unique life circumstance and identity, and it is the nature of human beings to separate and categorize ourselves by these identifying factors which include race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.  However, in the Occupy Wall Street movement, lending too much attention to such personal identifiers is often avoided in the effort to facilitate consensus and maintain group unity. While this avoidance helps to preserve the strength of the group, it does not leave much opportunity for an individual to emphasize their unique cultural perspective.  It is exciting that individuals are nevertheless willing to join together as one voice, even if it means not always feeling completely understood.

     

Just like everyone else in the 99% Emily and Yinka have very different backgrounds and life situations, which makes their collaborative process very much in-sync with the Occupy movement.  Specifically, Yinka is a 31 year old black female born and raised in Philadelphia, PA and Emily is a 24 year old white female from Missouri.  Although a supporter of the movement, Yinka did not attend Occupy meetings while Emily has actively participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

    

The proposed collaborative piece will be comprised of 99 slip-casted ceramic objects that represent the unique life situations of ninety-nine different Occupy supporters. The objects will be imprinted with the financial status, demographics, and/or personal grievances of these 99 people to convey and pay respect to their individualism and unique stories. The objects will then be connected together with fibers of different hues creating an intricate ceramic quilt.  In doing so, the individual ceramic objects become connected, unified, and part of a larger whole.

As an artwork, this ceramic quilt symbolizes a display of separate-togetherness, a way to simultaneously celebrate and acknowledge the individual while also demonstrating the strength in connecting and bonding in unity.