One of the things I set out to do during my Ma was to find out the links between Art, Craft & Design. A recent boom in the craft culture led me to wonder why so many artists were turning to craft as a format for their work. This has also become quite popular on the design scene. With perhaps obvious links between the 3 areas I thought the work I was doing and ideas I had in mind to implement would feed into this investigation to help answer some of these questions.
Each of the below project ideas have been formed intermittently throughout the course of the past 2 years (2011 - 2013). The Ma course encourages you to delve deeper into a subject more than you have ever previously done before and so in order for me to do this I must look at each of the ideas I have and understand why I have chosen them and whether they do relate to one another or whether they are each their own thing and so need to be looked at at a later date.
In order for me to understand what I have chosen to do and why, I have set myself the task of writing a bit about each of the ideas to gain a better understanding and to help me collate them or put them to one side until either they feed into the practise I will pursue or will need to be looked at as a separate subject all together.
The title's I have given each project in no way relate to how I expect their outcomes to form, they are at this point in time just a "title" for me to refer to. I have already begun to group and link the projects together as follows yet this may change once I gain a better understanding of what they are about.
LINKS BETWEEN ART, DESIGN & CRAFTS
- Artist & Object - Get Your Bits Out Exhibition
- Baby Jumper Pattern
- Ephemera Exhibit - To keep or not to keep
- Personal music equipment publication
- Subconscious/Natural man made mark making
- Be Hospitable 2
- Artwork for Found in Tokyo Album
INTERACTIVE GRAVEYARDS
This list is more a reference for research and the title refers to the project idea
- Facebook selling information on how we talk to one another
- The film 'Her'
- Charlie Brooker series - Black Mirror
- Sudoko engraved onto gravestone in the news lately
- Face sculptures of the deceased as memorials
- MeMe proposal
OTHER BITS
- Illustration
- Japanese typography based on enoki mushrooms and lotus root.
Artist & Object - Get Your Bits Out!
This idea began in 2012. I planned out the project and wrote a proposal which I took to Rachel Carr who is the Operations Manager at Liverpool John Moore's University. The proposal was accepted at the university but due to personal circumstances I was unable to follow through with this piece until now.
What things do creative people collect and why? Get Your Bits Out is an exhibition showcasing various practitioners' collections or a piece from within one of their collections that has helped to inspire them in their work. these may include ephemera, memorabilia, special editions, souvenirs or other random objects. When talking about what inspires us in our work we too often refer to other artists and forget about all of the things we surround ourselves within our homes and studios that influence the way we work. These ‘things’ are often never seen by any one other than the creative who collected them. Various practitioners across a whole host of disciplines will be invited to submit including Graphic Designers, Illustrators, Photographers, Animators and Creative bloggers as a few examples.
This show aims to bring some pieces out into the light and to help people get a glimpse of how collecting things helps the creative process and hopefully gain inspiration from another persons piece. Each practitioner will also be asked to answer a set of questions about the piece/pieces submitted. This information will be published in a piece of print and online for the show. As an ongoing project the exhibition may take place in other cities or venues and other practitioners may be invited to submit their inspirational collections to an online archive or as a monthly feature online.
Baby Jumper Pattern
Knitting has been a shared interest for a long time now between myself, my sister, our mum and my grandma. In 2011 I set up a blog (www.the-general-store.co.uk) which would record each of our creations, our inspirations and interests. I ran the blog for one year, but with Mum and Grandma not being internet savvy I had to process their contributions myself too. During this time I had many requests from friends to make them or a friend of theirs something knitted. After a while this took away what I enjoyed as a hobby and it became more of a task I had to do. Crafting can be so time consuming yet it is one of the gifts that many people appreciate and treasure for a long time. From this I wanted to create something that would have the same effect but someone like a designer (who were the main bulk of my friends wanting things) could also play a part in the craft and feel that same attachment to the finished piece. As baby items are the quickest and easiest items to make (and you learn things a lot faster making smaller things) I decided to use this as my starting point.
I want to find a way of allowing different creative practitioners to be able to put their own designs into a form of craft without them needing to understand how to actually "make" the craft. Some people feel they can't "do" craft as it were, and through this project in some ways it will move some people further away from the traditional craft, it will bring them closer and perhaps more comfortable with the idea of craft and introduce a new way of combining a particular practise with the craft of knit in this case.
I began the project by knitting out a baby jumper and mapping down the stitches and directions onto graph paper. This is as far as this project has been taken. My next steps would be to translate that skeleton of the pattern into a piece of software that enables a designer for instance to design their own babies jumper pattern. At this stage without having done further research, these designs would only vary through colour and not stitch patterns i.e. only using basic stocking stitch. Along side the piece of software I imagined there to be a physical instruction sheet as you get with a knitting pattern but this would instruct the user only how to implement their design onto the jumper pattern using the software.
Ephemera Exhibit - To keep or not to keep?
I recently took on the task of emptying out one of my cupboard's at home. Over the years I have collected pieces of ephemera from various places I have been to. My collection did at some stage retain itself to a bright green sprayed suitcase I had from my foundation course, which every now and then I would sift through for inspiration or if I had too many new pieces for my collection I would search through and throw away pieces that no longer inspired me. This collection has grown into my drawers at my work desk, from most holidays abroad I have a carrier bag, specific to that holiday etc etc. Now before I begin this might seem like a diversion from my initial task yet I thought it worth a try!
Whilst having a sort through my cupboard to try and bin a lot of this ephemera I began to wonder about other people's collections of ephemera. What do they collect? why? Would other people find my collection as interesting as I do? I wanted to find out whether all of these things I was keeping were in someone else's mind, worth keeping. And so came about the idea of 'To keep or not to keep?' I would put all of my collection into an exhibition space. The gallery wall's would be divided into two spaces one labelled "To Keep" and the other labelled "Or Not To Keep?" the audience would be invited to rummage through the ephemera and place the piece on the wall where they felt it best fit in.
This then began to take on another level as everyone's decisions would be subjective and therefore, no one would ever place all the exact content in one space as somebody else would. The exhibition space would be a never ending exhibition as how could it end, who would have the final say on how to divide up the collection on ephemera? As it is my collection would that decision lie with me?
Personal Music Collection Publication
I now own a large collection of experimental music equipment that once belonged to someone very dear to me. As I don't know how to use any of this equipment, the reality is I will perhaps have to part with most of it some day. Also the idea of me keeping such a collection and it not being used by other feels unjust. Therefore I wanted, in my own way to keep some kind of record of all of these objects before I part with them for me to look back on and also for me to share with other people who have an interest in these items. My main aim is to photograph and record each of the items in the collection and form them into a publication.
I wanted to take the idea further than this as the pieces that I will have to let go of, I want to know that they are in a place that they deserve to be and so, my idea developed into documenting each person with the item they will take away with them as part of the publication. This then opens up a whole other opportunity to the project, that after a certain amount of time, I'd actually like to re-visit these people and look into what kind of music they make, what instruments/equipment do they use and how has the piece I passed onto them influenced their work, or perhaps not. The scale of this project is vast, and although I have a personal attachment to the objects, how people use them is something I am unable to relate to at this point in time. Yet I have the ability to do all of the above and have an appreciation for these artists that would be nice to share with others as well as a personal exploration.
Natural Markings
When visiting some friends in London earlier this year, I was fascinated by the wall leading up the stairs into their flat. Each of the residents owned a bike and so had to carry it up and down the stairs every day to use them (with it being a small London flat) From doing this, the bike handle bars had rubbed beautiful marking up and down the walls and created a kind of sea of drawing that the maker wasn't aware of perhaps creating. I realised I was already noticing other mark making that I found aesthetically pleasing that were made of a similar process where by the maker/s are people carrying out everyday banal tasks that they are unaware that they are creating a form of art. Other such examples were the spoon markings made on the inside of white mugs and the pieces of test paper that you find in stationery shops. I wanted to form a collection of these findings and introduce people to the fact that they are perhaps every day making art or marks without even noticing it. To make them take more notice of their surroundings in which they do their everyday activities.
Be Hospitable 2
I am a co-founder of The Souvenir Collective and last year as part of the Liverpool Independents Biennial we came together asking creatives that we each knew from our cities (Liverpool, London & New York) and asked them to submit a piece for us to exhibit based around the theme of Hospitality. This show was supposed to move onto London and then onto New York. However personal circumstances haven't enabled this and so the project is at a stand still. The next show is due to take place in London which ought to be run by the member in that area, however this has not come about yet.
Found in Tokyo
Collaboratively putting together the album artwork already designed for another format for it's limited edition release onto vinyl. This is also on hold for now until the records have been cut.
Interactive Graveyards
I can't quite remember how this idea came about initially, perhaps after a trip to Japan I became more interested in the way that other cultures deal with death in different ways. I began questioning whether when I pass, do I want to be buried in the conventional way or will there be a different way then that I will prefer. Graveyards inhabit so much space and with so many of them filling up, I wonder if there will be anywhere left for those who chose to have this when they pass. I want to look at an alternative way of having memorials. The idea has begun to look at having interactive memorials/graveyards whereby people strolling through can use an app on their phone for instance and using something similar to a QR code can look online and learn about who that person was and what they did in life.
Once I began to talk about this idea with friends and colleagues it became quite an interesting topic. Some people weren't to keen on the idea incase they hadn't achieved much and others loved the idea. I also began realising that this was another level for me to want to hold onto and collect the memories of people as in the above projects. Again through more chatting I started to breach the subject of a cyber personality of yourself that remains once you are passed that your family and friends can interact with. I have a list of current films, tv programmes and pieces of research compiled to help me delve further into this as a subject.
OTHER BITS
Illustration
Over the past few years working as a freelance graphic Artist I have been given a few illustration jobs. I have never practised my illustration much and so the styles which I use tend to come from someone else through a set brief or are influenced by someone else when their is no style set. So from this over the next two years I would have liked to have honed my illustration skills but with all of the other project ideas I have I can see that it is not possible and so have decided to just try to refine my mark making through using my sketchbooks as research and documenting tools for the above projects.
Japan Type
Yet another collection of mine are photographs of objects from Japan. In this case, a set of photographs of some beautiful enoki mushrooms and lotus roots arranged in a way that when I arrived back home I could manipulate these images to create typography. This has always been something I have managed to do whilst away on holiday but time didn't allow it this time around and so by recording the shapes I thought I could pursue this when back home, and have yet to see this project through.
These are the main points of focus that I have brought with me to my Ma course. Since talking about them with other people I have come to notice the links between them and although as I mentioned earlier, each project idea came about in it's own right there are very obvious links that need to be looked at and considered before going ahead with any of these tasks.
My next task for myself is to refine these ideas and see how they link to one another, to create a mind map of each section and understand how and why I will go ahead and realise each of these proposals.
No comments:
Post a Comment