Jiali Li

Soldier Duckling

"Maybe everyone has friends, but not everyone has imaginary friends. Having imaginary friends is a normal psychological and social phenomenon. The body of the works is derived from questionnaires about what imaginary friends look like. Among these imaginary friends, the designs are selected and their characteristics are extracted and enlarged for redesigning. This thesis collection is a series of brooches, mainly composed of sterling silver, epoxy and textiles. It is divided into three parts, namely Bean Suit Man, The Mouse Did It and Soldier Duckling. This series of works aims to evoke the good memories of imaginary friends from people who have had imaginary friends and to bring people to think and discuss imaginary friends."

“Soldier Duckling is C's imaginary friend. C's major is machine learning, which requires writing codes. One way to think about code is to speak your mind. The little yellow duck is what a programmer talks to. In software engineering, rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code by articulating a problem in spoken or written natural language. The name is a reference to a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line-by-line, to the duck. Soldier duckling's favourite person is a princess, and his task is to protect his princess. Its helmet and part of its body are aged, reflecting the vicissitudes of battle. These battles refer to many entanglements and struggles in life when the creator does not want to keep working hard or wants to give up. Whenever C thinks about whether he should pursue trying to write code one more time or get up early to go to class instead of skipping; these little inner struggles are the "battle" of the little duck in the creator's heart. In this imaginary friend story, the princess is the personification of good things; whether it's writing a set of code perfectly or not being late for today's class. The soldier duckling, wearing a helmet and holding a sword, is the creator's idealized self. C is willing to pay and work for his ideals.”