Leather

made as a silhouette costume piece for faited’s live ambient set. was definitely channeling amf korsets / fleischauer creations for the top (stiff little vegtan pieces). knocked this up in 2 days also while working on my own aerial/costuming piece, since we were performing in the same show. did tonnnns of tooling and could have done more if i’d had more time. the attachment was sketch af (although ended up being a bit more solid than what it shown here… used pawns and buckle attachments). ...

articulated leather spine: veg-tan, rivets, hand-tooled, hand-painted. molded. i made this piece in 2019 but took this photo later, modeled by faited.

made for the contortionists in serchmaa byamba’s company. designed to not impede movement for moves like headsits and pretzels. they are pinned into the hair for attachment. design is based on sketches by serchmaa, tooling design and patterning by me. detail of tooling (rivets not set) -- mongolian cloud pattern. this gold headpiece was for the soloist, and the silver ones were for the company ...

used opencv to identify vertices fit to my face, used plastic wrap as a clear pattern that i transferred the dots to, marked lines connecting the dots, cut it out of vegtan with an xacto (very labor-intensive), beveled and slicked all the edges (so many!), wet-molded the mask to my face, dyed black, applied retroreflective tape dots to the vertices, added hardware. ...

this is the first leather piece i ever did, via a leather intensive at thecrucible.org that taught basic vegtan skills and then helped you execute a project of your choosing. i copied a fleet ilya mask based on just a few pictures and was surprised with how well it came out. ...