Action 11 | Grad Studio I
For this last action, I thought about ways I could celebrate all my actions at once, something that wraps up this semester quite nicely. But the pressure of making one conclusive action was too much. The fact is, this does not feel like the end, so I can’t make a conclusion about something I feel like has just started. So, I decided to make something just for the sake of making and having fun! No intentions and goals behind it.
I went through all my actions in my head and thought about the ones I had the most fun doing, the one the brought me more joy! Ironically, “joy” has been a big part of this semester. If you draw a mind map of all the words there were used in our classes, joy is a really big word. I was skeptical about it at first. I thought to myself, what does joy have to do with such a messed up world. As I went through the semester, I slowly started to realize the power of joy, and thanks to Garima and her workshop on “How to joy”, I decided to do this activity in the spirit of practicing joy and play!
The joy of making
Looking back, I experienced joy in all my actions. I had joy when in action one, I got to meet and know someone from thousands of kilometers away despite my anxiety about meeting new people. I had joy when I was making a video sketch with Zahra and her cat got in the shots every chance he could. I had joy when I was knitting with my friends in the freezing cold weather on the roof, and I had joy when I was sitting behind the laptop for hours creating my digital forms.
But out of all those moments, the ones where I was making and creating freely with my hands stand out more. I re-discovered the joy of crafting in this studio. The slowness of it, its calmness, and its capacity for allowing more thought. This is something I did not think was going to be a part of my graduate studies, but here I am, quite sure that I want crafts to have a big role in my final project.
Making and Exploring
So, in the spirit of making without intention, I decided to do the first thing that came to my mind. I gathered a bunch of fruit peels throughout the week, and I started exploring their different qualities by making. I cut them, dried them, made powder out of them, boiled them, made a paste, put them in the oven, burnt them, and…. Some results were successful, some were a huge fail!
Here is a series of pictures from what I have done ( I did not photograph all of them).
Palettes of fruit
In the end, I incorporated all the things I had made into recycled paper. I wanted to explore the different types of textures and results I could create with them. Here are the ones that worked and didn’t crumble into pieces as I tried to pick them up!
red apple – orange (with green peel) – grapefruit – orange – grapefruit – lemon – tangerine – green apple – tangerine
Orange 
Red apple 
Tangerine 
Green apple
Later thoughts
I became obsessed with the different textures of these papers. In our small peer engagement session, Soumya mentioned how these papers could be used as an educational tool for kids who don’t have the ability to see and learn about different types of fruits from only visual texts. Melanie also mentioned that I could use them for actually writing on them. I did think about writing small letters to all my friends before leaving Tehran. So maybe I will use these papers. Let’s see how that goes!
