Author: bedfj

I visited my godmother in Bristol and thought it was the perfect opportunity to visit galleries in the city.

We visited the Thebes exhibition on ‘Spike Island’ by Benoît Maire it was an interesting exhibition with how it was laid out. It was almost maze like to get to different parts of the gallery. As he works in film, sculpture, painting, photography, collage, and performance art there were lots of different things interacting with each other in a small space.

I love his work with how different all his pieces are from his video loops, to his sculptures, to his painting that are kinda abstract and his films. I particularly like how his sculptures interact with each other to create new installations.

I especially enjoyed his film on which came first the egg or the chicken. Very different way of presenting something like that as it is quite a philosophical topic and he presented it as a normal day of a business employee.

As part of our ‘artist as historian’ project we visited the Lapworth museum of Geology. This allowed us to see how curators in real life thought about space and how they present artefacts and items in museums.

This allowed us to think more about lighting and space and different audiences that we had perhaps not thought about before.

This week we received a brief that we had to curate and maintain 3 social media accounts that followed a theme. I decided to make an instagram page because I use it daily and know how it works. I also made a tumblr so I could try out something new and see how each social media platform impacted what and how I wrote on them. I also made a twitter account because I had never ever used it before and I wanted to try something different. It was also interesting having one that was purely word based.

My tumblr one was based on poeple with amazing moustaches and beards. It’s always been a fascination of mine and the fact that poeple enter competitions for their facial hair is amazing. My Instagram page was based on the colour yellow. It is one of my favourite colours and I noticed that Birmimgham was a very yellow and orange place and I wanted to portray that through the page. My twitter account was based on conversations between me and my best friend. I wanted it to be relatable but funny and I think I achieved that.

After presenting out social media pages to the group I gathered some helpful imformation to expand the pages and take them further.  For my yellow Instagram page I could geotag future posts to see where in Birmingham I took the pictures. This would make it more personal and as though I was writing a diary with yellow pictures. For my twitter I could make some of the conversations longer so they varied in length, this could give it a more comedic effect.

Our challenge for this project was to pick a piece from the Birmimgham museum of art we visited and create a story behind it, or based on it.

I chose an artists called Katy Jalilli and a self portrait picture of herself looking very powerful as part of the LGBTQ+ movement.

I decided I wanted my book to be based on the lgbt movement and so I started by interviewing students about their coming out stories and their journeys through life feeling like that. I was able to get amazing stories and experiences which I believe makes this project both personal to them and to me as I included my own story.

I made my own peaceful protest posters and included some history about Birmimgham and Cyprus. I was overall happy with my final piece even though due to printer problems I wasn’t able to print it how I wanted to.

 

We had one-on-one meeting with our tutors where they helped us see our progress and give us some suggestions on artists and websites to visit to make our projects more in-depth. This allowed me to figure out how I was setting up my pages wrong and to look into how other LGBT groups set out their website and how they have presented certain aspects of their website. I was then able to see what clashed and how I could make it .

We visited the museum of art for inspiration for our next project. It allowed us to go out of our comfort zone and explore new artists and ideas we wanted to incorporate into our current or future projects.

We brought all of our collages from the past few weeks and put them all into a book trying to relate them to each other, seeing which ones had more impact when placed together.

We bound them together using Japanese stitching, either simple or complicated.

On Tuesday our group got inducted into the metal workshops. Most of the machines were very similar to the woodwork station. However we had some practise bending and spotwelding steel sheets and copper coated steel rods so we could get used to the noises and strength of the machines so we could be more comfortable next time we had to use the workshops. 

Our brief was that we had to use steel rods to make a frame for something with a void in the middle so in future we would be able to make frames for machines we would be making. I decided to make an octahedron. I turned it into a terrarium for a plant and it turned out quite successful. It was interesting finding ways of attaching the pieces of metal together and getting comfortable to do them on my own. 

We were asked to collect as many manuals as possible for our next session.

I assumed as we had a future plan for a design brief, that we would be studying then so we knew how to put some of their elements into our own briefs.

However, we took the manuals and had collage exercises, letting us explore our creative side and have no boundaries with what we can make. We played with space and layering and how certain words or pictures ahve a bigger effect together than apart. 

We had an exercise where we presented our favourite pieces of work from different artists and had to determine which one we believed was in higher taste.

We were made to see that some art work that may seem low brow actually have a deeper meaning to them and are most of the time actually high brow. It was a great exercise that opened our eyes to deeper meanings behind art work and showed us that we should never judge art work based purely on what we see.

Last week we were inducted into the woodwork studios. We were taught about the health and safety procedures while we worked in the workshop; such as the different levels of danger according to each machine and which ones we could use without assistance from staff. 

Steel toe capped shoes have to be worn at all times while in the workshops. Dangly things have to be tucked away such as hair or lanyards. 

We learnt how to cut pieces of wood into accurate blocks and then continued to use the machines that will allow us in future to help us with our work. 

We made joints as that would be the most useful to our future practises. I then continued on with the piece and added small blocks of wood so I could make it into a stand for a frame. (As shown below).