Feathers Boa - Virtual Worlds Artist
Feathers Boa has been active in the Second Life Art Community for over two years. When she first joined SL, she was an art student at a university in Massachusetts, and now works as a freelance designer for an innovative entertainment studio in Seattle.
In SL, she has established an impressive body of work that includes fully immersive pieces, interactive digital "paintings," giant robots, aesthetically innovative avatars, and full architectural builds. Her work has been shown in dozens of galleries throughout SL, including two that she curates: Feather's Bay and Tickles & Bites Gallery.
She participated in NPIRL's 'Garden of Earthly Delights' collaborative exhibition and the 2009 Burning Life art celebration. She has lectured on interactive and 'reactive' art at a number of venues including Ice Caverns, Four Bridges and New Caerleon. She also built the art school on New Caerleon, which she co-directed with Bryn Oh from 2008-2009.
Her artwork has also been featured in two international RL exhibitions, 'Rinascimento Virtuale' held in Florence, Italy in October 2008 and 'Through the Virtual Looking Glass' which opened April 7th 2010 at the Harbor Gallery Boston.
Personal Statement
"What I look for is ways to use Second Life as a medium. I want to create something that could not exist in the real world. Something surprising and unique to the virtual world. My work is not always about beauty, but I am obsessed by beauty especially in the female form. I believe that we are seeing a new form of creative expression being born in Second Life and other virtual worlds. There are so many talented people here and the best is yet to come."
Technique
Feathers trolls junk shops and back alleys to find interesting objects such as old sepia photos, newspapers, postcards, letters, broken watches, etc., to create many of her pieces. She either photographs these objects using a Nikon D90 digital camera or uses her Epson RX580 scan bed to scan them directly into Photoshop. These "found" objects usually form the central images of her pieces. She also uses Cinema 4D, Vue and ZBrush to create wholly digital 3D objects. She sees textures everywhere and never leaves home without her camera in her handbag or backpack. When the digital work is complete, she brings textures into SL and adds them to prims to make sculptures or to multi-layered canvases and then makes them come alive using simple LSL scripts. Each work "reacts" to the presence of the viewer in unique ways and must be seen to be believed.
Real World Avatar
Feathers' real life avatar was born on the outskirts of Philadelphia, PA and is still way too young to take herself too seriously.
Links and Publicity
Below are a few of the sites that feature Feathers' work: