Communication within Collaboration

Our group for this Unit have done quite well I feel with communicating with one another so far throughout this project. We have a group of Facebook which we use to share our blogs, pinterests, ideas and we also discuss meeting up. This morning before our lecture we decided to meet up for a quick coffee and to just update one another on what our thoughts are, if we are on the same track and where we think we can take the project. We are starting to become more aware of the little time we have left.. and starting to panic a little. Personally I feel that I have done a considerable amount of research so far and NEED to start drawing and developing my ideas. After speaking to the rest of the group my mind has been settled a little as we all feel that we are in the same boat.

We have been thinking about our final piece, which I feel is still a little early to think about. However we are thinking about have a photography outcome, using different images of peoples faces and exaggerating this persons insecurities or something that they love about themselves. These will be collaged and mounted onto A1 paper. Although, this is just an initial idea, we are going to book a room within the photography course and start taking images and we will them separately work on the images ourselves, but checking up on each others blogs to see if our work is relating to one another.

Also we have made ourselves a time table as uni have not provided us with one this term. We have set deadlines which I feel is very important as we have goals to meet and we do not want to let one another down. I am currently in the process of printing out my research imagery and responding to this. I plan on working into my images with the sewing machine and seeing what outcomes I can create with this technique.

Research Safari..

When I first heard that a 'research safari' had been organised I was quite hesitant to par-take.. exercise is not my strong point! However, a group of around 20 of us from unit x, and Susan the tutor set off around Manchester to learn more about the history behind manchester and also to discover fabric shops that we did not know about.

Firstly we started off around the Northern Quarter and the Ancoats, I am not really that familiar with this part of the city as it can be quite out the way from the centre. The Ancoats was really pretty in some areas, keeping Manchester's artistic vibe but with a lot more character. A lot of people of italian decent used to live in the Ancoats along side a lot of the fabric mills and factories, they opened a lot of ice cream parlours, making the Ancoats now my favourite part of manchester!

In the top left image there is a spy hole peeping into one of the abandoned factories in the area, which I though was really interesting, although this image isnt a very good one.. It still has all of the old machinery in there and is currently under construction. It is sad to see all of these historical places being put to different uses now that the country has no need for many British manufacturers. Also all of the streets are named things to do with the industry such as Cotton and Loom street which I thought was quite sweet.

We also took a walk through parts of the city centre, passing through Victoria Railway Station and Cheetham Hill. Susan lead us to the part of the city that holds a lot of textile retailers, one of which we were allowed to visit and take a look around, Central Trimmings. They had so many different trimmings, fabrics and fastenings, floor to ceiling! Now this district is full of mainly wholesalers which is not good news for us students however if we all chipped in the owner said we would be more than welcome to return. 

I feel that this trip was quite useful in the sense that I learnt a lot about Manchester that I would not have learnt otherwise. Also it broadened my knowledge of the textile retailers available in Manchester as I did not know of many. However I do not feel that this activity related to the actual project 'Unit X' itself.

Nikos Gyftakis

Another artist which I found myself on Pinterest is Nikos Gyftakis. He has created a number of self portraits using a fluid-like technique. It looks to me that he has used oil pastels to create these using a large scale of colour.

His portraits are so life like and fluid. I am going to try and re-create this type of drawing myself to see what outcome I can get, although these will not be self portraits, they will be portraits of other people, and I think that I will try and incorporate some of my textiles style into it by using couching to create the fluid lines that Nikos has used. I will use different threads and thickness' of stitches to create this. I believe that this could look quite interesting as a lot of the work that I have been looking at this past week have been more embroidery based.

Ernesto Artillo

One of the girls in the group posted an image from an artist she had found and I thought it was extremely inspirational. So I looked a bit further into the artist and found a few images that I thought related well to our project and could help us develop our concept further.I find these collages really interesting as they are very abstract, this is something I would like to look into myself.

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.