Ila Waller

"The Band-aid Solution"

The Band-aid Solution is a diptych designed to blend together and features a before and after scene of a wearable sculpture and its destruction. The sculpture displays a wire base, surrounded by irregularly shaped fabric pillows and ultimately covered in ornamentation (rhinestones, beads, puff balls, stickers, pipe cleaners and googly eyes). The sculpture is designed as a wearable head piece and is centered around the childish solutions to ugly problems.

Throughout my childhood I struggled with difficult problems surrounding my familial life and I know it’s not uncommon. When my parents got divorced, I tried everything I could to keep my family together, but when you’re that young and you don’t understand how relationships work you find that the only thing you can do is pour yourself into the problem and hope a solution occurs. The colorful and childish materials represent my futile efforts to keep things from falling apart. I thought by metophicaly throwing stickers and glitter over a problem I would fix it. The figure on the right is a depiction of what actually happens when you try to put a bandaid of sparkles over a family falling apart, it still falls apart.

Each material making up the “band-aid” is selected from the typical kindergarten art project and are staples of my childhood. Things like rhinestones come to represent another critical meaning behind my project - what does it’s best to look like a gemstone ends up amounting to a painted piece of plastic. Much like the efforts a child makes to render an ugly thing beautiful, the use of individual interests (sparkles and gems) comes together to create a messy, seemingly worse project. My project focuses on a child’s mentality, and more closely mine growing through my childhood. I’ve always loved an abundance of color and as a kid I’d cover notebooks in stickers, and put sparkles in my hair. My efforts to beautify life were precious, and futile, and that dichotomy is implemented in my diptych.