Bus Tickets....3D Trace:

    So I can't believe we're on Christmas holidays! It's lovely to have a break but I'm definitely going to miss college.... The last week of college I had been working with the rolled up bus tickets, which I cut up very small. I wanted to make something abstract , more freestyle than the rest of my work. I think the bus tickets themselves are the human trace so I'm just displaying them in a way to make you consider the physical evidence of our movements etc...This is something I need to finish before assessment but it's not going to take too long!
    My film about human traces and memories is actually done now but I'm having trouble posting it so I'm working on that ! :-)

    Here is how my 3D bus ticket piece is coming on....

Busy week...

    
    I've been editing my film and I'm hoping to be ready to post it tomorrow or Friday...I've also been working with the bus tickets to create something 3D or create some form of trace or mark making...
It's really busy these last few days as I also really want to finish up my sketchbooks and contextual notebook! It's not really work though when it's this much fun...

  The past few weekends I have been working on a video which I was kind of inspired to create after making the image transfers. They became like visual memories..physical evidence of human movement combined with my memories/ the imprint of  these spaces on me. With the film I'm hoping to capture human traces in an old holiday home I used to stay in as a child. It's empty and abandoned at the moment but to me it holds such memories and evidence of our existence....  I'm hoping to get it finished this week!!

Tina Byrne

The image transfers I'm doing reminded my tutor of this artist, Tina Byrne. She was one of the artists whose was part of "Bricks in the Rain", the exhibition we went to earlier in the year. This is an image I took at the exhibition of her work....

    These are known as "'decals' , another word for transfers and these are made with enamels that will adhere to ceramics when fired to a certain temperature. The photo above is the work of Tina Byrne and with a little help from photoshop she created these images and then placed them on tiles. Enamel or transfer firing is usually a third firing and reaches between 840 – 870 oC" (http://crannmorpottery.wordpress.com/)


 These are like my transfers only onto ceramic plates. They are beautiful and have a collage-memory-like appearance to them.

Life Drawing II

Today I went to life drawing classes again. It was really good practise because I'm trying to bring in some more drawings into my project now....Here is some of the work...

 

These sketches were from memory, which was actually so hard to do!

These were memory sketches too. We looked at the model for 30 seconds and then had to draw the pose from memory!

                                                                Quick 30 second poses.

Trace of me...

 

          This morning I began trying to make a stop motion animation with my wire lady. I had started when I kind of questioned the point of it...yes I was showing movement but was I really capturing the idea of a trace...? I feel I have moved away from looking at human traces solely following our movement .... I'm experimenting with the idea of the trace we leave behind once we are no longer in that space...it's a trace, a ghost like blur, a sixth sense, a memory, it's nothingness with a sense of someone's presence. So I decided to grab a wire cutter and break up my wire woman.... remove her from the space ( after hours and hours of work and wire cuts to actually create her, this was difficult but I felt it was necessary!!). As she disappears the space becomes empty, but we remember her presence there, a trace of her is left behind......or so I think anyway!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

        

 

For the love of art........

     I finally finished my wire-woman and just have to make some kind of stop motion animation now....I like the sketchiness of the structure, I was trying to draw with wire basically. I also was working with bus tickets during the week for another 3D work... I was robbing these off all my friends so I could include a trace of them in my project too... I also took the city bus once or twice and emptied their bins of ticket stubs (ewww, I'm still washing my hands!). All for the love of art........

I've been rolling these like an addict this week...

 

     

Prints!

       So on Tuesday I made some prints ..for the first time this year I might add, so they are not amazing...but I really enjoyed the process and it was good to try something new! I started trying to make mono prints of some kind of human traces, like a blurred, is-it-a-person-figure but I didn't really like the finished pieces. I had some wallpaper with me so I decided to make a print of those instead! I think wallpaper in itself is a form of a human trace....it's evidence of human presence however long ago.... 

 

Prints of wallpaper...

Franchesca Woodman

        This artist was recommended to me by one of the tutors last week and when I researches her work yesterday I found it really relevant to me. Franchesca Woodman was born in America in the 1950s. She took her first self portrait photo at only 13. In her 30s, when in Art College, she took these series of photographs. I really love them . I think they are absolutely beautiful.There is something haunting and eerie about the images. Woodman used long exposure to capture movement- creating photos of her trace in these old, run down spaces. There is a ghostly timelessness to her work. I particularly like the photo where Woodman  is peeking out behind wallpaper and a fireplace...it's almost as though she is becoming part of her space (/ vice-versa).  I find Woodman's photos sad when I consider the fact that she committed suicide at only 22. These photos are her legacy. Her work is often debated.....some think she passes comment on woman's social standing, others think she wanted to explore the human body in space. Someone suggested she wanted to disappear in her surroundings, ultimately like she did in life. This morbid reading of her work is denied by her father.
       I would like to take influence and inspiration from her work, esp. the long exposure and the illusionistic feeling to her work.  Over the weekend I had begun a video in an old, broken down house my Nana owns. It used to be our holiday home when we were younger and it holds a lot of important childhood memories for me. It kind of ties in with Franchesca's work...capturing a human trace in a very empty space.


Self Portrait at 13!

More Traces!

Here are (yet again....) image transfers I did this week, using the acrylic gloss gel.....my fingertips were seriously raw! I really like some of them, some capture both memories and human traces...

 

My home

Paris

Paris

Paris

Life Drawing

I've been busy this week with image transfers, handing in my first essay on Wednesday (whoo) and life drawing on Monday. I had never done proper life drawing before so it was a really good experience. The main objective was capturing movement and motion as opposed to human form. I'm posting some of the images, others just look like a load of lines and circles on a page, but I suppose it's all mark making .... Most of the poses were under a minute which meant I really had to loosen-up and draw quickly. I guess it was like capturing a human trace...?