Michelina Risbeck: Ordinary to Extraordinary - Wedding Dress From Recycled Materials
Stamps student Michelina Risbeck’s team recently won third place in the annual 42 Hours Re_Creativity Contest, designing a wedding dress out of disposable kitchenware and aluminum wrappers.
The 42 Hours Re_Creativity Contest involved interdisciplinary groups of at least 3 members studying different majors to join together and create a project out of recycled materials. This contest, sponsored by Living Arts, gave contestants 42 hours to complete the design: from 8pm, November 1st to 2pm, November 3rd. The projects were then displayed in the Duderstadt hallway, viewed by the public, and presented to judges who then awarded 1st — 3rd place based on a set of criteria.
General criteria included the following:
- Creativity of the project
- Unconventionality of the material/s being reused
- Innovation in how material is applied
- Conceptual depth of the project
- Level of aesthetics/craft applied in making the project
- Successful completion
Risbeck’s team designed a wedding dress out of disposable kitchenware and aluminum wrappers. The concept behind this aesthetic piece was to juxtapose Western Culture’s values. Plastic cups, spoons, forks, paper plates, coffee filters, and aluminum are commonly used and discarded daily. A wedding dress is typically worn once and kept for life. Designing an item that is highly valued and unessential using objects that are under appreciated, yet more essential in life expresses the idea of what people truly value in life versus what is necessary.
The interdisciplinary team — Michelina Risbeck (Art & Design), Yisha Zhao (Engineering), Isabel Martin (Engineering), and Katelyn Hoag (Music, Theatre and Dance) —
brought students with different strengths together for the collaborative project, transforming materials by breaking and removing parts (shoulder spoon piece, front swirls designs using the bottoms of cups) and by repeating the same object (lit-up trail by folding coffee filters). The team’s piece lights up and contains five rotating flowers made out of paper plates.
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