"The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree"
Lead on Paper, 2017
"The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree" is a lead on paper artwork that I produced in my final year of school in Year 12 Visual Art at Mindarie Senior College. This piece was dedicated to the females in my family, acknowledging my cultures of Scottish and Italian heritage and the women of my family that came before me that have shaped who I have become now. This work includes many generations of my family from both sides of my family including myself, my mother, sister, aunty, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and great-great grandmother to truly scope in on how far back relatives can influence each other.
The second part of this project reflected on the cultures and traditions that came from both sides of these families through food. From my dad's side, Italian, it has been a tradition that has spanned generations of having a family meal of pasta on Sundays with the whole family (right). This is compared to the tradition of my mum's side, (Australian/Scottish), of nights where card games were shared over a bite of homemade apple pie. Between the cultures through food and the generations of women before me, this was how I chose to present myself in this artwork.
This project lasted over a couple of months and had an extensive amount of work and hours put into it. Although I was currently undertaking 5 other classes at that time, the majority of my spare time outside of school and my art class was spent working on this project. I spent a lot of time taking photos of my progress over that time span to look at the sketches from a different perspective and see how they looked from a far, in particularly, how realistic they looked. I couldn’t include all of the progress shots that I took over the course of this project (there were a lot!) but here are some of them to show how the project took form.
A set of images showcasing the progress of sketching the women in my family. From the initial outlines to the final product, these images capture the beauty and uniqueness of each woman as the drawings come together.
Images demonstrating the progress of the food scenes in the artwork that depict the food culture of my heritage.