Confident that my first prosthetic is in a good place, I’ve started thinking about my second prosthetic. I know I want this prosthetic to represent worry, anxiety, and sadness.  I started thinking about how worry and emotional burden present in our everyday lives. My mind sees hands rubbing together, muscle tension, and the vision of being weighed down. When I am worried, I am very fixated on a worry, and unable to pull myself away. I started exploring different ways I might represent these emotions visually.

I thought about the idea of being weighed down by having something hang off of your body and showing muscle tension by creating something that elevates the shoulders. Emotional incapacity is like wearing boxing gloves so I thought about covering the hands and using layers and layers of leather like wrinkled and overworked skin. I started to sketch these ideas out until I came up with a sketch that I liked, then started to do some prototyping in felt.

I am very interested in creating volume off of the body for this piece and interested in sewing fabric in a way that it can stand up alone on its own. I started experimenting with the felt, shaping and overlapping it in various ways and sewing it together. I experimented with creating a three-dimensional form with as little sewing as possible, knowing that ultimately I want the final version in leather, and it is not going to be as easy to sew leather. I came up with a basic modular piece I could use for most of the prosthetic, and started pinning it to the dress form to try and visualize and contextualize my sketches. I went back and forth between my sketches and my sewing machine working all the kinks out until I had a felt prototype that I liked. At this point I started to think about color and experimented with colored pencils to explore some options.