Exploratory
Glass and Ceramics
The Glass and Ceramics rotation week was a week of experimentation. The week started off with four workshops: Ceramics, Hot Glass, Architectural Glass, and Print on Glass. Out of the four workshops I had to choose only two; the four workshops were only testers and were only an hour long, whereas the two I chose would take place over a day each.
Out of the four workshops, I chose to do Hot Glass and Architectural Glass.
The first workshop was Hot Glass and I have to admit, I was scared to do it; It also didn’t help that I was chosen first for the activities so I didn’t have an idea of what to do. The first activity was drawing with glass, where you take a ‘glob’ of glass and let it drip onto a damp piece of paper, the glass would burn the paper and leave a burnt drawing on the page. If you left the glass on for too long it would act like a pair of scissors and cut through the page.
The second activity was to make a paperweight. You started of with a small ball of glass and then dip it in different colours of powder, you would then manipulate the glass to however you wanted, then you cover that with another layer of glass and then shape it into a ball, after that you cut if off and let if cool, you then flatten the bottom.
The second activity I wasn’t that scared for. For Architectural Glass I had to design a few shapes and patterns which would be sandblasted onto 6 pieces of square glass, then after they had been sandblasted I had to glue the squares together to make a cube of glass.
The images below are the finished outcomes of the paperweight and the cube.
3D Design
This weeks rotation is 3D Design. At the start of the project the class was put into groups, given different materials and then told to create a 3 dimensional sculpture, the meaning behind this activity was to open our minds a bit so we could understand 3D Design that little bit more.
After that, I decided to look into different ideas for what I could make. I thought about different materials like wood, paper, plastic, and card, and looked at the different methods I could use to make a sculpture. After I had a little brainstorm about materials and methods I got a little stuck so I decided to look at some artists for some inspiration. The first artist I looked at was Tomas Saraceno; instantly when I looked at his website it came up with his current piece In Orbit. In Orbit is a fantastic piece that shows how space can be used and distorted. I then went onto looking at Richard Serra’s ‘Matter of Time’, an installation/sculpture piece that I believe is designed to pull in the audience right to the heart of the artwork.
Having looked at these artists, I still had trouble coming up with ideas, mainly on how to execute them. I then came across a very clever video called ‘Box‘. ‘Box’ is a video which shows very technical use of projection-mapping, this is where a projection is being displayed on a moving surface allowing the user to create optical illusions. So after watching this video, I decided to create an origami shape of my own design and display it in its own environment, two foam boards that will hang behind the origami.
I originally wanted the concept that the boards would be the same as the boards in the ‘Box’ video, but then my tutor shed some light on the matter and said that he liked how the origami sat in its own space between the boards, and that the origami gives off an unreal feeling, that the origami should be some unknown material that could create its own laws. My tutor then told me that if I was to extend this project, I should maybe consider doing some form of animation and give the origami its own physics and laws and an unusual quality. The images below is the final piece.
Fashion
For the Fashion rotation, I decided to do a ‘protest’ and not do fashion and instead create something different. The topic that I was given was ‘Black is the New Black’, so I did start off with looking at a bit of Fashion, but nothing appealed to me. So I took a different approach and kind of took a step back into the Visual Communication rotation and decided to do another drawn based piece of Art.
At first I did struggle to find any artists to be inspired from, but after a small chat with the tutor, I came across Marina Abramovic. Abramovic is a performance artist who shows how far the human body can be pushed over it’s limits, and then some. A lot of her work is endurance based, where she doesn’t stop the performance until she psychically can’t do no more. The one piece of Abramovic’s work that influenced me was ‘Freeing the Body’, in her piece she stood naked with a scarf around her face and danced to the rhythm of an African drum beat; this piece continued for six hours until she collapsed on the floor from exhaustion.
I intend to do a similar piece of work (not nude), where I will wear a white box on my head and draw to the sounds I hear around the studio that echo inside the box. I will also still stick with the ‘Black is the New Black’ theme by wearing black clothes.
The images below are a time-lapse of the performance, the final image is the Final outcome.
Visual Communication
This is the Visual Communication rotation; to start off the week I was asked to respond to multiple pieces of music by drawing, painting, and cutting. After the workshop I was asked to focus on one of the pieces of music and use one or multiple methods to express the music. I chose a piece called ‘Window‘ by ‘The Album Leaf’, A piece of music that to me sounds calm, smooth, and peaceful. When I had a day to collect my thoughts in what direction I would take this piece, I had the idea to make a drawing with my own imaginative solar system; I chose this because the piece sounds ‘spacey’ and puts me in my own dream world, floating through space and seeing the planets as I pass by.
So when it came to doing the final piece, I decided to get together four A1 sheets of paper, tape them together and start drawing my imaginative space theme in response to the music. It felt strange to do this as I have never drawn to music before, but it felt peaceful, and relaxing compared to the manic haste of creating a sculpture. As most of the drawing is circular, it felt as though it was a form of ballet, the charcoal dancing across the paper creating a smooth, seamless piece that shows how music can be expressed through something you can see and not just hear.
Below are images of the artwork that I created during this week’s work. The last image is the Final piece.
Lens Based Media
The second rotation is Lens Based Media; I can do anything from photography, through to film. I started out with a brain storm for all the ideas I had which included documentation, storyboards, anything that I could link to photography/film. After a bit of thought I decided to do a storyboard/timeline which over the series of the photos would decay or evolve into a different environment. I chose to use a daily diary of sorts, my daily diary; a storyboard of me waking up, getting ready, going to uni and falling asleep. But then I hit a bit of a barrier of how to decay the timeline, so I decided to make it a dream within a dream, a continuing loop of dreams that never ends; the decay will the characters will to continue, that he will never ‘wake up’, he will become more and more distant from finding the real world and will either accept his fate, or give up. For this loop to happen, I had the character fall asleep while working, which he would then wake up in bed to start the loop over again.
I have only made three of the millions of the cycle; these three are at different points of the story. The first line is towards the beginning where he is starting to realise what’s happening. The second line is towards the middle where he’s deciding what will become of him and weather he should continue or stop. The third line is between the middle and the end, he’s stuck between what he should choose, but because he still cycles through, he gets further and further from reality and is slowing running out of time………this is the third option he can chose to never decide, to see if he escapes in the end.
Animation
For my first rotation, me and a few friends have to work together to create an animation. We can make anything and do anything to go into this animation; we started with a brainstorm and came up with ideas that interested us all. After the brainstorm we came to an agreement to start off with a card trick. We didn’t really have any plan on what to do or which direction the animation would go. So we decided to look at a few animations created by PES, who are a group of people that have created animations for tv and also for their own pleasure. After looking at PES’s work, we had a better idea of what can be done in an animation and came up with a fuller plan than we started out with.
Now that we had a better idea of what we could do, we decided to look at a bit of ‘smudge and click’ animation; this is where you draw out the animation but leave behind a trail of where the animation has been. We started off the animation with a simple ‘pick a card’ card trick, then when the volunteer went to place the card back, the deck would move; this then lead to the whole deck traveling from a 3 dimensional to 2 dimensional form and becoming ‘smudge and click’. We didn’t realise how long it would take to do the ‘smudge and click’ which meant that we had to wait to the next day to continue.
When we came back to finish the animation, we realised that we didn’t need to do more ‘smudge and click’ and that we could go back to the stop motion. After having the time to think, we decided to move the drawing back into 3D by turning it into origami, then have that origami run around on the floor which would then return to the magician. After returning, the magician would pick up the origami, retrieve the deck of cards and complete the trick.
Below is the animation that was created for this project, I hope you enjoy it.
Railston Artworks 