Settling In

I guess settling in isn't really the correct term for the current stage my work is at. I've developed and explored quite a few ideas mainly focussing on memories fading and building and how the process of printing and drawing can represent that. I came across a quote in a book called 'The Production of Space' by Henri Lefebvre and started to look at how time was marked in my old house by the possessions that filled it. This led to me exploring how we had stripped the house of it's identity and age by taking out all of our objects to be moved into the new house. With the new house I'm looking into aspects of displacement and being unfamilier with a space.

A consequence of looking at all this in my project has meant that I have found it quite hard to think about going home. Obviously I enjoy seeing my family, having a bigger house, having food made for me by my parents etc. However my instincts recently have been to stay where I feel settled. So I've been at uni for maybe 2.... possibly 3 months now and haven't actually spent more then 2 days in the new house. It's no wonder I don't see it as home yet!

It will be interesting to see how I feel about my project when I have lived at home for a month over Easter.

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New Semester- New Project!

I haven't posted anything for a LONG time, so I thought I would try and get things going again with some stuff I've been looking at recently and will be looking at in my next project.
I'm carrying on the 'homeliness' theme my last project was evolving into by looking at my old house and the new one I'm moving into...today infact! I've only done a drawing and one painting so far but I have another painting on the go!
Hope you like so far- any ideas of what kind of things I could do are always welcome.

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Tiny Update!

I haven't written anything here for quite a while which is simply because I haven't really been producing anything! But as soon as I made a miniture draft for the artist book I am creating I decided to put it on here.

If I'm honest I love it being this small, it was printed and cut out of a peice of A4 paper and folds up into a tiny concertina-style booklet that can fit in the palm of your hand. Fortunately the real thing wont be that much bigger! It's content is made up of the little 'tile/object' images I have been making and showing on here (I used some of them to make my wallpapers as well so they are turning out to be quite versatile as artworks go), along side the poems and Edward Lear texts that the objects were taken from. I've also written a bit about me and my work. I'm hoping to get the final 'product' finished tomorrow so lets hope that all goes to plan! If it doesn't I'm sure I can just use these tiny little drafts to win the readers hearts!

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Some More Wallpapers!

Thanks to everyone on facebook who commented on my previous designs. The general feedback was that I needed to add a little more to them to perhaps make the individual motifs link together a bit more, so with my new designs I have tried to do this. In the first I used some of my sepia drawings to create a more interweaved design. The second is another black and white objects design, based on 'The Pobble Who Has No Toes' by Lear where I have made the motifs go diagonally across so it fills the page a bit more. The strength in the pattern going across diagonally is that it creates movement between the motifs, in contrast to the slightly sparse feeling the up and down patterns have.

Just to let you know, the sepia objects aren't following any Lear poems, I didn't really look at his texts when I did these photos and ink drawings, so for this design I just used my favourite images!

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Just some wallpapers I designed...

...As I said I wanted to take my work down the decorative route so I've been playing around with wallpapers and making motifs out of my object images. With the two motif-based designs I tried to collect images using the Lear poems so one is based on 'The Jumblies' and the other on 'The Courtship of the Yonghy Bonghy Bo', the third is just an Escher style tiling of glasses...

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Day In The Life Of......

.....A Painting.
I'm mixing together paintings and photographs in one big 'tiling' of images and this is the process I go through to make the paintings:

Step One: Again I need a whole bunch of new objects.
Step Two: I paint a sheet of paper in black acrylic.
Step Three: Once thats dry I cut it up into squares of roughly the same size as my photos.
Step Four: I now have the little black squares to paint my objects on.
Step Five: I start painting one object onto each tile in white paint.
Step Six: I tack them up with my photographs.

I've found that as I have done this more and more, my painting style has gone through a number of different stages, at first I used only white paint, painting only the white areas and highlights resulting in quite a thick, contrasty image. However after a while I started using black paint aswell to make the black areas of the images stronger and to tidy up the areas I had highlighted.
Now when I paint the objects I find that not only do I use solid black paint to enforce the darker areas, I'm also mixing it with the white paint so I can introduce grey areas and shading into my images. The result now is less contrasty, but a lot more tonal and life like.

The direction I'm hoping to take with these images (both painted and photographic) is dictated by the objects. They are all quite decorative objects so I've been playing around with the idea of wall papers and making a homely feel. This could be because I'm away from home and often miss it.
The Edward Lear texts are still involved but they are taking a more supportive role in my work now. I'm going to use the poems to catagorize my objects when it comes to making motifs, so the individual wallpapers will be illustrative of his poems and texts. 

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A Day In The Life Of.....

....A Photo.
The project I'm currently working on is quite sequence based, I mentioned earlier in my blog about Edward Lear and how I looked at him as a starting point, but I have moved onto the actual objects themselves. An artist called Sarah Sza said that she gives meaning to her objects through the context she makes for them (I'm afraid I dont have a direct quote of this) and I find myself understanding her the more I look at my objects. On their own they are just objects found in my home or a random charity shop, but I'm putting them in poems, along with other decorative objects which have also taken on meaning and they all link to each other.

Another thing I have found is that how I treat each object creates a massive link between them. Even without the poems and texts that include them, the processes I use to make them into art give my objects meaning and context.

So this is what I do with them:
Step One: Find/ buy them (obviously).
Step Two: Place them on a black sheet of paper (usually painted black) and photograph them.
Step Three: In photoshop I crop them down to become a square.
Step Four: I convert them to greyscale through split RGB channels.
Step Five: I adjust the brightness and contrast. 
Step Six: I add a scratchy looking boarder.
Step Seven: They all get printed out and cut down into shape on a guillotine.

And they are done! I will then tack them up with all the painted images onto my studio wall!

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