Tuesday 11th September - Pathway Roundabouts

Today, we were told that we would be seperated into small groups and we would be going on these 'roundabouts' as Jamie called them, experiencing all the different pathways on the course, such as media, fine art, printmaking, 3D, textiles etc. The group I was in was 'tasting' textiles today. I like the sound of this because I was interested in textiles.

We had a brief introduction to textiles in which we were told that we would be experimenting with different kinds of textures, surfaces and grids.
We were told that these little pathways that we were experiencing was something that we would kind of eventually get marked on. The title of this little project was Grids, Layers and Reflections. so whatever work we did had to fall within this and we were told that it could be our own interpretation of that.. we didn't literally have to draw buildings and grids because that would just be boring and straightforward and thats not the point of art. With art, you have to stand out from the crowd and be an individual and independant otherwise I feel that you wont get far. If your scared, you wont be successful.
Using an overhead projector, we projected images such as photos and drawings onto different surfaces of our choice e.g. paper, newspaper, fabric etc. As this was the first workshop that we had done, we didn't really have any other work or a set theme to follow which I thought to be difficult because I dont like working freely. I was stuck for what to do. Danielle said just try different things but I was out of my comfort zone. when I don't have a title or theme, I get confused and I dont know where to start and finish.
First, on the overhead projector was an image of a skull. I used charcoal and drew the image onto newspaper. it was pretty straightforward.

 

I hadn't ever thought that textiles was about drawing and texture like this, but I learnt that this was a journey, and it had to start and end somewhere.

 

I then used really wet, runny protein dye and kind of painted it onto some plain white paper, and sprinkled some salt onto it. By doing this, the salt absorbs the dye and once dry, if you rub the salt off, it leaves a textured looking distressed look to the dye that it has been on. I wasn't too impressed with the outcome. We were told to think about layering textures/pictures/drawings - I didn't really like this idea because I like everything to be neat and tidyily presented.

Protein dye and salt

 

Following this, I did some screen printing. This was the technique that I liked the most as I was familiar with it and felt more confident doing it.
I went to have a look at the screens and saw one that had just text on it. I thought that it would look good if I put it over a picture. I used some black inky dye or whatever it's called and dragged it across the screen with a piece of paper underneath to print onto using a squigie. The outcome I was really pleased with.

 

 

 As the piece of paper that I had used was smaller than the screen, it had printed onto the card underneath and as I had done a numerous amounts of prints, it had been overlapping and I didn't realise. When I saw it, I like the way it looked so I kept it.
At the start of the session, we were given a brief that gave us information about pathway and if we were to take it up, what would be expected of us to produce at the end. There were also some artists references on it. I looked some up and found that I quite liked a couple of the artist's work.
One of these was Yinka Shonibare. I was a bit reluctant after having looked at the other artist's work as they didn't interest me but this one I was attracted to.

 

 

 

This is Shonibare's work that appeals to me. It has a weird and wonderfeel to it. Shonibare’s work explores issues of colonialism alongside those of race and class, through a range of media which include painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, and, more recently, film and performance. He examines, in particular, the construction of identity and tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Mining Western art history and literature, he asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today. Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions.

Another artist's work that I liked was Jeanette Appleton.

 

The principle element of the work is felt, a material with direct connection with the nomad and land. Exploring the spatial effects of colour with dyed wool and the distortion of printed or stitched marks on various fabrics. Evoking visual systems of knowledge and memory in the untouchable perspective of land areas and layers of eroded history.

                                                                                      Activity 2 - Photograph (Afternoon)

Before this workshop, I used to think that there isnt much you could do with a camera other than take straightforward images/photos, but after this workshop, that all changed.
We were only briefly told about what we were going to - we were using torches, cameras and gels - these looked like coloured transparent pieces of acetate. We used a digital SLR Canon camera with an open shutter of at first 30 seconds.

 

What we were doing was called Light Painting. Working in groups of two, we could use glow sticks, torches and lasers. All we were doing was practically waving the torches and glow sticks around whilst we had a 30 second slot in front of the camera. It was just like an experiment, and as with the textiles workshop, we didnt really have a set theme but I soon figured that you couldn't really have one, as I couldn't see where the last place I had waved the torch, because it had to be done in the dark othewise I dont think that the pictures would have come out very clear.
As we were doing this, an image was being created in front of the camera. I didn't really get the point of this at first and wasnt too fond of it, but the more we did it, the more I enjoyed it, and the more creative I got.

 


 

Me and my partner Georgina decided to stay back after everyone else and we thought of drawing around each other with the torches. We discovered that the red laser wasn't really that powerful, and we wanted different coloured lines and shapes so we cut the gel into small squares and taped them to the end of the torch to give the different colours. We also tried to paint a house and a pretty lanscape with a sky, the sun and some grass but this was more difficult than we had first imagined, as we couldnt see where the last line was that we had drawn, but it didnt turn out too bad in the end!
I really enjoyed this workshop, and I would like to experiment with photography a bit more.. I can see how it could be linked to my pathway - maybe I could draw patterns with the torches - using the gels as different colours, but I reckon I need a lot more practise with light painting first!



There is a website called www.lightpaintingphotography.com, which has some examples of artist's work. Below is a link to a video from the website that I think is just amazing! These guys are really good.
http://lightpaintingphotography.com/light-painting-photography/light-emitting-dudes-led-freerunning/