Wednesday, 10 April 2013

Easter

I have been really disappointed with myself over the Easter holidays as I really have not done a sufficient amount of work.. or at least not as much as I would have liked. So this week I am basically just getting on with it, doing the tasks that have been set by the tutors and turning up to sessions, keeping up to date with my blog and gathering more research. I am also going to start drawing this week as well. However I am not the only person with these worries as I have spoken to my group about this and we are all in the same boat. Although I have a lot of faith in my group as we all seem to be quit hard workers.. when we want to be!

Hetain Patel

As part of our Contextualising Practice lectures we occasionally have guest lecturers, this week we had a man named Hetain Patel. He is a visual artist who graduated in 2003 and has been working on a variety of pieces of art ever since, mainly focusing on using photography and film. In the majority of his work that I showed us today, he was very involved in all of his pieces, they were all mainly based around himself and his heritage. His passion for experimentation and investigation was evident throughout the lecture, what interested me in his work was his use of recording the work. Many of his pieces were just photographed and documented, however some of his pieces were recorded. I feel this is something my group need to look into a bit more as our Film and Media studies students have yet to turn up to any of our group sessions.

Although these students have not turned up, I feel that we should not rule out recording our ways of working or even using a film as a final piece. It is definitely something I am willing to look into and venture into further, however, I will discuss this further with my group. 



On the other hand, I was not overly fond of Hetain's work. I was inspired by the use of texture within the photographic pieces, however the film did not interest me. Maybe because I did not understand a lot of it, and we were only shown short snippets.

Presenting our Posters

So today we had to attach our posters to the walls in the Hilton House for all of the other groups to see. This was a really good idea as it allowed us all to see what other interesting ideas people had come up with, and some peoples concepts were extremely interesting. We had around two minutes to come up with a three minute presentation about our concepts and posters, and everyone from our group had to speak. Although some of our group did not turn up I believe that our group did quite well, we had a lot to talk about as we had really went into a lot of depth with our concept and had a lot of ideas to share with everyone. We also had a great feedback with the tutors who loved our ideas. The idea behind these presentations was to review other peoples work, to learn from our own and to create inspiration from one another. Also as this was our first creative task it gave the group some opportunity to see everyones different styles.



Thursday, 21 March 2013

Poster Presentations

Our next task is to create an A1 poster each to present to the rest of the PERFORM/ REVOLT groups. Our posters must show our individual points of view on our concepts. I am looking forward to seeing everyones posters as we are all creative people and this is our chance to express ourselves and really showcase what we can do and what we intend to do. Although this is a collaborative project, we all have our individual styles and we need to take this on board. I feel that once we have all shown one another our posters we can get a better understanding of each others intentions, and also see what the other groups are thinking about doing. This is a learning process for everyone. Personally I have tried to use the influences of chemistry, highlighting this with the use of molecular structures layered over different areas of someones face. I have used four different faces, just faces I have found from the internet so far as I have not had chance to start taking photographs myself. I took the colour inspiration from and image that I found on a blog, this was just to brighten up the image, however I like the idea of the photography being in black and white and highlighting this with splashes of colour.

Here is the final outcome of my own poster, created using Adobe Photoshop.


175 Faces of Chemistry

Sub group 5 is no longer! We are now '175 Faces of Chemistry' as this links to our concept a lot more and helps the tutors single us out when needed.

One of the girls in my goup, Gabriella, came across an interesting Science company that just so happened to be celebrating their 175th anniversary in 2016. Here is the clipping from their website that will give you a better idea about our initial concept.

"In the countdown to the RSC's 175th anniversary, the RSC is celebrating the achievements of 175 diverse chemical scientists. Over the 175 weeks before the RSC's anniversary on 23 February 2016, the RSC will feature 175 different scientists, building a portfolio of inspirational people who represent diversity in its broadest sense."

My group plan to use this as a basic starting point for our project. We have decided to expand on this and begin by collecting 175 images of 175 different peoples faces. We will choose this person at random by either counting to 175, asking the 175th person we see, or walking 175 steps then asking the next person. Once we have a person willing to allow us to use an image of them, we will ask them questions in order to learn more about them, such as 'What are your aspirations?', 'What inspires you?' and 'How would you describe yourself?'.

We will be able to generate more research and work around these questions as we can look into the persons charecter aswell as just simply drawing their features. We also plan to record this process, as unfortunatley our Film and Media studies students have decided not to engage with this project, and have not yet been intouch with our group. However as a group we have all decided that we would still like to film certain aspects of the process as we think it could lead to an interesting outcome and will allow us to challenge our selves as it is something we have not yet done before and after all this is what this project is asking from us.

Hilton House/ Sub Group 5

So today was the day sub group 5 finally got to meet! I was really aprehensive as I am quite shy however my group turned out to be lovely! All the girls had really positive outlooks on the project and this settled my mind a lot. Unfortunately the Film and Media studies students that are part of our group did not show up today, hopefully we will get to meet then soon enough. We met in the Northern Quarter of Manchester in Hilton House. The NQ is known for being really cool and trendy.. cliche I know but it is quite an inspirational area to work in. however the building is not.. it is cold, dirty and dark. This however should not stop our creative process.

We had to bring with us to the meeting three facts about the number 175. There were many that were quite similar such as 'The plane that crashed into the twin towers on 9/11 was flight 175' and 'There is a number 175 bus route through London'. We spent the rest of our time discussing the ideas that we were interested in. Some of the ideas that came up were really interesting and I would ahve been quite happy to take any of them into a final idea, however we had to the ruthless and decide which topic we could all be passionate about and really take forward and develop. I will keep up to date with our final idea.


Unit X

Today was the start of our new project 'Unit X', this unit is a collaborative unit in which Textiles in Practice, Fashion design and Film students unite to create a collaboration of work. At first I was very aprehensive about the word 'collaboration' I found it very scary as I am used to working alone and not having to rely on anyone or being able to let anyone down but myself. We had a lecture about what the subject was going to be about, and this was the number 175. What am I meant to do with that?! was my main reaction. However after researching into this I have found hundreds of facts about the number 175. We could even interpret this into 1.75, 17.5 and so on...

I really do not want to look at the first thing that pops up on google or wikipedia, as I feel this will be everyones 'go to' fact. After a long hard think about this project I am really looking forward to cracking on with it and getting started as I think that there could be some interesting outcomes from it. I am anxious to meet my group tomorrow but also quite excited to see what they have in mind.