Jolanda-Pieta van Arnhem, MFA

Today I am going to back track a little and talk about the Smushed Pennies/Penny Project. Seems like a good day to do this so here goes.

Many many days Jerry is kind enough to walk down to the train tracks, drop off pennies to be run over by a train, pick them up the next day, and deliver them to me with a note with the date they were smushed. Why? Long story short Kevin told us about this and assured us that if we put the pennies on the train tracks they would not tip the train over. He brought some in and they were beautiful. Of course I wanted some! What beautiful hair they would make! I knew I would love to photograph hair made out of smushed pennies for my Hair Project. I had also just heard on NPR that pennies cost more money to make than they were actually worth so this made the adventure even more appealing.

So, saying all that here are some pictures of the “Penny Smushing Process.” I would like to add that this is the first time ever I have put in a real live photo of Jerry (with his permission of course). I keep threatening to sign him up for E-Harmony or MySpace or something. So a note to the single girls…this ones a capital K Keeper, and quite cute to boot:

Jerry patiently waiting for me to take his picture

The Train Tracks

Regular Penny

Smushed Pennies from Jerry & the Train Fairy

So far to date we have smushed pennies from:
May 12, 2006
May 15, 2006
May 16, 2006
May 17, 2006
May 18, 2006
June 6, 2006
July 24, 2006
July 28, 2006

The plan is to engrave the date the Train Fairy came on each penny (this is why they are in separate envelopes) and then turn them into hair by drilling holes on either end and attaching copper O-rings to make a “strand” of pennies. I am going to need a lot of pennies so this will take a while. As far as I know Jerry’s still willing to drop off and pick up pennies (what a nice guy!…single girls take note). I was fortunate to score all the copper this weekend during project light for the O-rings. I spent some time Saturday stripping old electrical wire to get the copper out of it. It should work nicely for the O-rings.

Jerry also gave me a bunch of pennies from his trips to England. I am very very excited about these. We decided not to put them on the train tracks but I am going to incorporate them into the piece. This is probably a good time to state that Penny is going to be a miniature version of Lady Madonna (her hair is cello sheet music of the song Lady Madonna) with the body of a violin and Pennies for her hair (Penny Lane). The idea came to me after watching a Ripley’s Believe it or Not episode about circus stars. In particular, the story about the largest and smallest women in the world. Brilliant! It all started to “come together” and I had found my purpose for the smushed pennies. I will sketch out Penny in more detail and post it in the near future.

That’s about it for the evening. On a separate note I found the date by accident of the first post that I started spell checking the blog (Sunday, July 9) and I will start working backwards from here so that HEaMUSEsme will be content. I will try to continue to back track some more tomorrow. Cheers.