Seven Paper Flowers (From Nothing)
By Summer LoPriore
For this object, I created seven paper flowers. I thought about what this prompt means— “something out of nothing” as it pertains to capturing “something of you in this moment, in this place.” As my first year at Trinity comes to a close this week, I reflected upon my initial experience of college during a global pandemic, and all of its associated anguish. In life, it seems, especially during such troubling periods as these, we must continually make “something out of nothing.” We must find something beautiful in the monotony, reach for hope where there is none, deciding that sunlight on skin in the morning is enough to spur newfound courage and a renewed belief in anything divine. In all the years composed of months composed of days of our lives, we must make meaning of the material which lies dormant around us. Such is life, and this assertion has never been so palpable to me as it is now.As such, in relaying something of myself in this moment, I decided to mirror this daily action of making “something out of nothing” by rendering flowers: innocent, divine, beautiful, out of the material which surrounded me in my lonely dorm room. One of the flowers, the all-white one, is created from left-over drawing paper of the InterArts class led by Caleb Nussear which I had lying at the bottom of my closet. I thought that this material choice was also a nice connection to the way that artmaking, represented by the notion of InterArts with which this paper is imbued, is an essential means of the ability to make “something out of nothing.” The others are created from the pages of a book I frequently tear out of for collage, another thing just lying around my room hardly ever opened.
An additional aspect of my making this object is that I wanted to try something new. Instead of writing a poem surrounding my idea, I wished to embody again the notion of curiosity in forging a new path for myself led only by my own drive to do so. I went on a YouTube exploration to try to figure out how to make paper flowers, as this is the first time that I have done this, and found a video which explained it well. I believe that this concept of curiosity which has rooted our class from its inciting moments is also infused in the idea of “something out of nothing” in life. We, as humans, discover topics, processes, endeavors previously personally unexplored purposely, literally “of nothing” as there exists no prior experience. And through the conduit of curiosity, we then render “something” new, either mentally or physically. For example, in my case, I now know how to make paper flowers and possess physical paper flowers. Symbolically, these flowers being made from found, virtually worthless material mirrors this notion as well. This is the same concept which I touched on when creating my painting for Jenna—there are materials all around us waiting to be discovered and transformed anew.