field of pins

Ok, so I went a tad crazy here, perhaps due to the “Shelter in Place” order throughout the World and for me here in Montana.

This image has quite a production history, as one might imagine. The base element is a “Pinpression” novelty, one of those frames with a ton of pins that mirror the form of whatever you put against it, in this case, half of my wife’s face. This object was then was duplicated, flipped horizontally to create a total face, albeit a strange one. In keeping with its namesake, I also cut the top of the element to form the shape of a crown.

Then, I sourced an object that came to mind for this construction… a Christmas ornament that looks a lot like the images we have all seen of the Coronavirus. I used this for the decorative head piece and the eyes. I then shaded the object’s shadow side, the top right of the image and lightened the left side and added a reflective light effect in front of the piece to ground it to the surface, the cast shadow works in this regard as well.

This is certainly not a direction I thought I was heading today. A curious evolution of elements out of my library, conjured into this nefarious fabrication of the virus that is holding the world hostage. I did err toward giving the life form some benefit of the doubt by not making it completely evil looking, which would have been easy, but it is just a life form trying to live and propagate… sound familiar? But I did manipulate the mouth to feel more sinister.

In Googling the word “virus”, it had this to say… “A virus is an infectious agent that occupies a place near the boundary between the living and the nonliving.” Somewhat aptly describes my image.