When I started to think about entering the 2023 HATalk Competition and its subject, the Earth, I immediately went to get information on how the Greeks thought about this matter. As they thought the Earth was a kind of sphere surrounded by a huge body of water and Greece in the middle of it, I imagined my hat with this concept. Then, to give the idea of the best materials to use I decided to experiment with something flexible but hard enough to manipulate without using any kind of glue or polyester. So, the best material to try was something I had already used when making basketry. Of course, not all type of willow showed to be suitable for it, but when I tried with a 1mm Rattan Medula , it proved to be perfect to make the structure base and the domes which would represent half of the Earth and its different layers.These structures were made by hand using basketry techniques. At the same time The Rattan reeds were a perfect example, in my view, of a sustainable use of materials which I could find in my own garden.
The name “Blue Marble” that was given to the earth by the first astronauts to the moon back in 1969, inspired me to use blue as a color for the hat base and one of the domes on which I painted a marble pattern using an EBRU technique.One of the Domes painted like a marble texture, represents the Sphere the Greeks thought the Earth was.The other ones represent the Interior, like the Magma and the Water inside, which I create with PaperDeco

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