Tutorial with Sam Belifante

I met with Sam on 31st October. He recommended that I watch the Alexander McQueen documentary on Netflix to further my knowledge of the history of haute couture. He wants me to use it to critique my ideas more in order to push my thinking. Sam suggested that I play around with the nature of the materials further, such as making the pillow dress smother someone, in order to push my ideas alongside exploring the materials. I showed Sam my second year work in order to help him understand my practice more. I showed him my film of my ITS NOT ALL BLACK AND WHITE project, with Lucia and Lisa wrapping wool round each other in the studio. Sam really liked this piece, especially the framing of the film, and the idea behind the work being 'ritualistic', and it coming 'from a real place'. He said that anyone could relate to the film without having any knowledge of Judaism or what the piece was about, he said it presented notions of power and intimacy, and when we started discussing Judaism, mentioned the connection to the garments of Holocaust victims being removed from them, and thus their identity being stripped away. Sam also mentioned how pillows during the Holocaust were the base for a lot of things, and how the shaved hair from the Holocaust victims were put into pillows for German people. I explained to Sam how I am planning a photoshoot, and how I wanted to use projections onto the models during it, similar to what we did in the broadcast project. It was productive to speak to Sam, however I thought my tutorial with Nicola was more helpful, so I am planning to speak to her again this week.