Sustained Investigation #11

Artist's Statement:

The idea behind this piece was to create something with silk, so I had to idea to embroider a spider dress. I liked the initial sketch that I made, so I decided to more or less follow it. This piece was somewhat inspired by Arachne, the old greek story of the woman who got turned into a spider. In the legend, she was turned into a spider for claiming she was better at weaving than Athena. Based off of this, I decided to have the spider make the dress while the woman was wearing it. 

I chose to also do a slight play on the name black widow for a spider. I think of embroidery as kind of an old woman's craft. Because of this, I chose to make the subject wear a veil, and look a little older. I wanted to play into the widow idea behind black widow. there is also something to be said about the term spider's silk, which inspired me to use silk as an embroidery medium.

One tricky thing was that the silk is see through, so I had to be carefull about what I did on the backside as well as the front side. I had to be really deliberate so that I didn't make a giant tangled mess of the backside, and have it shine though to obstruct from the frontside. Another thing that was an issue was that my thread kept breaking. For this reason you see a whole bunch of loose ends. I also had trouble with some of the porportions of the figure, but I think that I was more or less able to fix that.