Tiana Robinson - United Hands and Connecting Circles

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United Hands
Connecting Circles



The essential theme for this class and the main project is the idea of being connected. Both of my kite designs had something to do with the connectedness of the UAE and the United States. With my larger kite, I wanted to depict two hands holding the national flowers of the US and UAE, which is the Rose and the Tribulus Omanense. The UAE’s national flower can be used for medicinal purposes. The color of the Tribulus is believed to be the color of friendship and the second reason which is related to the first one is that the flower is available in only one color that is yellow, so for them,  it is the sign of equality and brotherhood.  The United States national flower being the Rose represents life, love, devotion and eternity. By doing this I wanted to have that image to depict the connectedness between the two cultures with something as simple and fragile like a flower. I feel as though flowers and culture can be compared since; they are similar. Both flower species and culture are immense, diverse, and delicate. The detailed orange pattern was inspired by one of the designs on the garments the UAE students sent. To go into more detail the traditional garment called the abaya, which is an outer layer of clothing women wear in some parts of the Middle East. It is normally long-sleeved, floor-length, and traditionally black. The abaya is worn over street clothes when a woman leaves her home and is designed to be loose and flowing, hiding the "curves" of the body. The abaya can be worn with other pieces of traditional Islamic clothing such as a scarf that covers the woman’s hair called a hijab, or a veil-like piece of clothing that covers their face called a shayla. I chose blue behind the hands to represent the sky/earth, and the other colors were just complementary. I screen-printed the linework of my design onto the Tyvek first then later I used acrylic paint the rest of the kite until completion. I wanted to represent that both of our nation's flowers are nurtured by the same sun and earth.  
For my smaller kite, the theme of connectedness was a little vaguer than my larger kite. For starters, I tried to do a gradient effect for the background to represent the sky. I screen-printed the background first by using a blank screen, then I exposed the circle pattern onto a screen than did multiple layers in different colors. The transition from a darker blue to a lighter color was meant to represent two different times of the day. Since there is a nine-hour time difference between North Carolina and the UAE, I wanted to depict that in the sky. Then the simple circles printed over and over in white, gold and orange were meant to represent the richness and historic culture. The connected circles layered on top of one another meant to represent how vast the cultures are in the UAE and in the United States. In addition to that in traditional Islamic patterns tend to use geometric shapes. The geometric patterns are believed to represent that sense of the infinity of God. Geometric patterns are used in many different Islamic arts, such as architecture, carpet weaving, ceramics, woodwork, and book covers for the Quran which is the religious texts of Islam.  




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