Starting print making...

The print workshop opened my eyes to something I had wanted to continue at foundation but never got round to. Also I felt I moved away from actual drawings and flat visual imagery and wanted to get back to it. This helped me approach it with an actual intention of taking something I was stuck with further. The results were eye opening. I found a fascination with drawing in this method, effectively layering up and abstracting the images to create really unusual effects. It is a quick method of trying the same image out in many different colour combinations whilst creating new versions by taking the lino away, changing the positions and textures.

These were a series I had created from two sets of photographs of my cube created earlier, the impact marks and the pipes showing through. These were also a set of three I later showed at my group exhibition, a module as a part of my degree, chosen because of the way they work together. There are many more versions that I might add later as they are all so different.

So these were my first attempt and I was happy with the result. I really wanted to try more to see how far I could push my liking of lino cut. I wanted to really simplify it next and just focus on the pipes to see what effects I could create and then just on the rubble left behind without the pipes to kind of separate this imagery off, break it down. It probably wouldn't be as successful but it would be interesting.

The next set of imagery is the pipes in the form of a square to match my sculptural boxes. I have various colours that work really well but have decided to upload this set of four as they all show the kind of changes in the imagery and they show the same set of colours that go really well together. However I will upload more later separately its just these really worked as a set.

I'm still working on the rubble lino cut, some of the initial tests have really worked but I want to push it as far as I can go.

Roger Hoirn and funky cubes...

Adjusting to degree Fine Art was tricky business, I've struggled creatively all year, a series of blocks and other problems. However I’m slowly getting there. I feel I have learnt a lot this year despite not being that satisfied with what I have done but it can only get better. It’s made me realize more about myself and I suppose that’s what it’s about. Anyway this is how it started.

A quick mention of Roger Hiorn's exhibition Seizure as it was a very large influence in getting my work started. I became more interesting in photographing the abandoned flat then the crystallized rooms. Not that they were not interesting, it was more that they had a haunting memories of the people who lived there previously. The ways the walls were broken away and the scraps and remnants of wall paper added to this sadness. My strange fascination with pipes appeared from this exhibition.

I wanted to keep a sculptural basis to my work at degree but I felt I needed to get back to basics and keep experimenting with process to keep my ideas excited by new things. After creating a series of experimental cubes, a representational minimalist approach to space and its eventual breakdown through time, (This was done through smashing the box and recording its breakdown), and using imagery from this I wanted to take this further into the print workshop.

A quick mention of the reasoning behind the pipes and Anish Kapoor style liquid coming from them. The pipes come from an abandoned bungalow. I saw these as a representation of the life force of a house, the veins and capillaries. A duality to the human condition, a physical and emotional deterioration, and fragility we all acknowledge. The liquid was just an experiment visually, giving the pipes something to flow through them, like an abstract way of taking their purpose of carrying liquids to a completely different function. The red liquid is like blood. Essence. Its visually appealing now the pipes are almost baron, dry with the plaster and board.

The yellow liquid is a mixture the same as the previous redone but from spices. I thought it would contrast with the bright red and would just be interesting to see what could be made from cooking spices.

Stuff.

As I'm sitting around at home not feeling to great, not able to get to my work at uni and post that up instead, I thought I'd post up the bits and bobs I have lurking around my house and on my old computer. Probably going to be a few posts like this. Its not great stuff, just stuff, but its something. This is from foundation again, just me messing around really, trying things out before the real stuff becomes something.

My friends face created using algenate, something I tried when I didn't really know what else to do. The idea stemmed from ageing, trying to recreate cracks and wrinkles. So I made a few Plaster moulds up from the algenate and tried glass and ceramics out with some strange attempts at ice...

The writing within the ice are just messages like "I am somebody" and a repeating message like "I am a mother, a daughter, I've laughed, mourned, cried" etc. just me trying express my thoughts in a 3-D way. I used the same method of the ice skate. Creating a Vacuum plastic form of a plaster version. An ice ice-skate! That was just me seeing what I could actually do and having fun doing it!

The glass is window glass, that's why its the strange green colour, this I smashed up and layered the mould, melting it at high temperatures so it just fused together.

The ceramics consists of stoneware clay pushed into the mould roughly to only show sections of the face and then pouring on (roughly again) glazes that are designed to crack.

Summer Project.

Before coming to Kingston everyone was given a summer project, based on the concept of space, which we could do with what we wanted. I really liked the idea of abandoned spaces. Houses that people have grown up in and experienced life, and how they are left afterwards like an empty shell of what once was. I chose to respond to this through photography something I have played around with during my foundation and thought this would be interesting to experiment with in the summer as its an easy way of expressing what I wanted to get across especially when the resources for making sculpture etc were not available. This is some of the imagery I collected when I spent a day looking for these spaces. Mainly from a abandoned barn and a old school house.

Underneath was a response to the markings on the door above. I really liked the idea of people touching a space and marking it.

Foundation- good times!

Looking back at my work in foundation there seems to be a recurring theme. All my work appeared to go back to a type of personal and physical deterioration. A breaking down of the body somehow and my apparent dissatisfaction with this process.

Starting from my early clay work, a Grayson Perry style pot based the change from a child to an adult. Feeling slightly disgruntled at the fact I felt a tad overwhelmed with the idea of university when I still felt like a child. The pot features nursery rhymes from my childhood and sketched images of photographs including extreme opposites of teddy bears, high heels and vodka bottles. Perhaps its my way of saying I felt children are growing up too fast, throwing away their childhoods too soon, a loss of innocence. Anyway for a first attempt I was chuffed!

The next installation piece was a series of clay casts of a Barbie doll I had made from a plaster mould (originally it had been a resin cast of a ken doll in pink but this was for my own amusement!). The piece was about body image, how were are all obsessed by how we look in comparison to everyone else and seek to make ourselves the same as each other. The Barbie doll appeared to be the perfect representation of this as it matched up to the ever-impossible ideas of the perfect unattainable body. This I then went on to experiment with the glazes and the presentation of the clay. It was a really interesting process and really enjoyed it! Using the same process I screen printed ceramic transfers of a series of statements commonly used by women in society linked to their body issues. Coat hangers came in handy for this work as it was easy to hang five slightly distorted versions of the female image onto a kind of clothes rail, or as others have commented, meat hooks. Each figure has an exaggerated feature, each a personal issue to a majority of women.

Glass was a possibility at my college and I was extremely keen to have a go. With the site specific theme my chosen space at Stanmore Orthopedic hospital I studied closely images of bone cells and really wanted to create a fragile, glass sculpture as this I felt highlighted the delicate nature of the breakdown I felt people who visited this hospital went through. I wanted it to hang from the hospitals trees on the outside grounds, like a wind chime almost, reflecting the natural light of the sun. They all connected a group of people all in the same position, representation of life. Created by carving the unusual shapes out of plaster and using crushed pieces of recycled glass in various random colours, which I connected through a swirl of steel wire.

Lastly for my FMP I wanted to create something personally linked to my experiences at the time, my Grandmother who has been linked to all my art work and a major influence on my life so far! I really enjoyed the textures and surfaces it created and really wanted to see the potential for it as a surface and sculptural qualities as final outcome. Conceptually I needed to express my complete loss of faith in humanity at the time. Observing treated of the elderly really angered me at the time; a complete loss of identity and respect was being highlighted from hospital staff and everyone around me at the time of my Grandmothers visit to a hospital. This at times left me totally at a loss. So this is what I based my work on. I wanted to use a personally emotionally provoking object, my Grandmothers ice skate, as she uses to be semi-pro in her youth and cast this in a block of plaster by dipping it in alginate. This slowly went through positive and negative stages, a series of six all together. Slowly deteriorating through time by a layering process of wood varnishes, paint and sand paper. They were almost 3D paintings.