Day 7. Dioramas
HOME– When I was in elementary school, I made a shoebox diorama. I’ll bet you did, too. I recall being quite taken with my make-believe scene, whatever it was. I placed a homemade doll-like creature with orange wool hair into my box. She was much too large for the interior. An orange-haired Alice in Shoeboxland, waving like a drunken girl outside of a limousine sunroof.
At eight, I didn’t quite grasp the power of a diorama– how it’s able to transport your imagination into a scene and onto a dream. Because I was transported by my Barbie and dollhouse dioramas on a daily basis, this idea was merely a given, nothing new.
A few weekends ago, I made a series of pipe cleaner animals with my godson. We stood them in a gold and yellow diorama and stood back to look. We were very pleased, standing above our African plain. 
Here are a few dioramas I’ve run across lately. They seem to have come back in vogue, like owls, terrariums and mushrooms. I suppose a terrarium is a diorama of sorts. And actually, one of mine has a mushroom in it. Huh. Media influence on our subconscious is a funny thing.
Wallpaper Dioramas | Elsita, my favorite paper-cutting artist, has a personal site, The Hidden Seed, that is playground for her sensational stylistic self-expression. Entering her online closet is like walking inside a kaleidoscope of colorful fabrics and shapely silhouettes. She poses herself against dioramas of brocade wallpaper and painted canvas. Oh, to be as confident as Elsita!
Winter of Contented Dioramas | Here’s another paper artist’s rendering of a wintry diorama scene– Sakura Snow.
Dioractive | This project recently won the Digital Open- an Innovation Expo for Global Youth. Alexis McAdams, an enterprising 16-year old, is proposing life-sized dioramas to illustrate global events that have fallen out of media favor such as protests in Iran and the deforestation in Brazil. Her goal is bring awareness back to worthy causes, believing if passersby see one of these life-size dioramas set up in a public space and continue to think about it for the rest of the day, perhaps they’ll take action.
November 7th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
That’s so cute. I remember dioramas. They’re fun to make. I still sort of make them now as sort of “3-d”ish storyboard for my film projects. My mom still has the one I made in grade school.
November 7th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Jt’s got to do a Mayflower, Pigrim, Indians, etc diorama due next Monday. Got time?
We miss you, Auntie, and are so enjoying this plethora of posts. Bec
November 7th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
oh, that’s ‘pilgrim’ x
November 8th, 2009 at 7:37 am
Or maybe they have always been in vogue, but we haven’t been paying attention? Like how you never notice a certain car until you buy that model…then that’s ALL you see on the road.
These are very cool. Especially like the animal pipe cleaners. So clever.