A Sussex teenager created a wedding dress made from divorce forms as an art project – and attracted 47,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook.
Fifteen year-old Demi Barnes constructed the dress, which features more than 1,500 divorce papers, for her GCSE art exam, local newspaper The Argus reports. The teenager, from Crawley, wanted to create something ironic, eventually choosing the wedding dress to suggest that too many people rush into marriage.
Demi found a divorce form on the internet and photocopied it hundreds of times to create the elaborate installation. She then posted a photo of the completed project on Facebook to show her cousin in Italy. Within days it had attracted thousands of ‘likes’ and been ‘shared’ (republished) and commented on by more than 2,000 people.
She told the The Argus:
“It was quite a challenge. I only put pictures on Facebook so my cousin in Italy could see it, but when I woke up on Sunday morning I was shocked to see how many ‘likes’ it had got. Some people have copied the image and put it on [blogging platform] Tumblr and there’s another 130,000 hits on there.”
Demi is expected to receive an ‘A’ grade for the project and has ambitions to work in the fashion industry.
Claire Davis, Head of Art at Lingfield Notre Dame school, said: “Demi became charged, like electricity, when she had the idea for the dress. This was an incredibly ambitious piece and it took courage, patience and tenacity to see this through from concept to final piece.”
