Collect Collect Collect

I need to gather materials. Touch them, play with them, and figure out how to use them in my art.

So I went to Winthrop's organic material dumping ground in Rock Hill yesterday. I have gathered some weird feathery plants, (not sure what they are called) and some magnolia seed pods and varying stages of decay. Some with mold on them and some without.

This weekend I also was burning some organic material with my boyfriend Adam, and discovered how beautiful Hay/Straw looks when burned. So I grabbed raw hay, charred hay, and ashes to bring back to my studio with me. Which leads me to......

DECAY

Decomposition...how can I talk about this without sounding like a serial killer?

I have been studying the various stages of human decomposition and the organic materials that are created from this process.

Without going into too much detail, I want to use the straw to represent decomposition and the beauty of each stage.

-I want to investigate decomposition of materials, and use this as a way to further represent, abstractly, what cancer does to a body.

How can I show cancer without being too obvious? Show decay. My idea is to put this straw into my latex pillows that I created last semester. I am making two new ones so I will have either 3 or 4 for this piece.