Casting work!

This past week as probably been one of the most enjoyable of the induction weeks so far.
Basically, I thought that the induction weeks where over since we finished three weeks of working with wire, paper and cardboard and photoshop... But we had a few more slightly more complex weeks ahead of us, that all involve using different areas and equipment around the studios.

The title of the post is pretty much self-explanatory; I`ve been producing casting work for the past week now. It`s been a lot more interesting to produce, and I don`t mean that in a bad way against the lecturers, basically they just wanted us to start off with a tiny idea taken from an object, which meant that all of the work we made was taken from very, very basic materials and objects.


It`s why I`m seriously excited that I`ve been able to do something that finally moves away from those basic materials that I`ve had to use the past couple of weeks. I haven`t actually done plaster casting before, which probably sounds seriously stupid to be honest. Like everyone else had at least done it once or twice before, and I was taking notes on the whole process since I didn`t know what to do to be perfectly honest.

Usually we have three lecturers that spread themselves between 33 of us, and they also work with different year groups; so they work with the foundation year, 1st year, 2nd year, 3rd year and the masters group.
But this then meant that we only had one lecturer and for only one day, and that was the Tuesday; on the Monday we just had to do photoshop work and basically keep ourselves busy for a day since the lecturer we where going to have wasn`t in. We had Jeremy on the Tuesday, and he gave us a not so quick induction on how to go through the whole process.

To begin with, you need a quite thick slab of wet clay. This just means it`s thick enough to push objects into to create quite a good cast. My object is still the bloody phones, I`m soooo sick of seeing them laying around on my desks,  plus there`s only so much you can do with the same three phones.

Then when the imprint has been made, you have to make a cottle around the imprints; you can do this just out of card. Then push it into the clay, this just means that when you pour in the plaster, it isn`t going to spill out everywhere and leak. If the cottle is wrapped around the clay slab, then you just need to grab more clay and push it up against the card so nothing leaks out of the casting.

After about 20 minutes - 30 minutes. You can pull the cottle out of the plaster and then try to pull the plaster off. In most cases, like with every single piece of mine; I had to then twist the clay that has somehow glued itself to the wooden boards we where using, just keep on twisting it both ways and it`ll eventually pull off.

Afterwards, if it`s worked properly, you can be left with something really cleanly casted or something quite faint. It depends on if you get the clay slab level or if you pushed your object in far enough. I ended up with a different range of faint looking casts and quite sharp ones, some on purpose and some by accident aswell. I just kind of messed around with everything.


But messing around everything turned out to be the right thing to do. I kept on making random cottles that weren`t even the right size or shape, and then this meant that I could file down the sides and make proper looking corners that turned the phone castings into proper looking 3D phones.

The only main problem that I had with using three phones is that the general outline and shape of them all is all the same, the screens themselves take up a lot of room so the prints from two of the phones weren`t that good; and I ended up taking them apart to get decent prints from them again. But that meant that I had to keep on using the blackberry phone, so at the moment a lot of my work just looks like these weird little buttons; which is becoming repetitive and not quite appealing to look at really.


I think I need to begin taking apart the other two phones completely so I can get some good work produced from the computer boards inside of the phones, The screws in the phones are so tiny though, I can`t actually find anything small enough to get them out with. Next week I`ll be working with printing, and creating basic screen prints

You can find all of my Casting images either on Deviantart (probably Wednesday) or you can see all of them on my Facebook page.


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Nottingham Contemporarys latest exhbition!

I`ve had a wonderful little break away from University today, this has been one of my weekends off and I wanted it to be productive in some kind of way.
Last Friday a new exhibition was put up at the Nottingham Contemporary, two different female artists this time around and one of my friends from University, Jas, was one of the people who actually helped to set up the whole thing! Marguerite Humeau; she explored the ideas of FOXP2 (I`ll explain later). Otobong Nkanga; the encounter that took a part of me.


Otobong`s work was really interesting to walk around but didn`t strike me on an emotional level, and I`ll explain what I mean by that later. Her work was site specific and one was a commission piece, it was large scale and quite dramatic.

One room had a metal strip that curved throughout the room; it was then filled with white pebbles, and small boards of work placed on top. Some areas had odd but large rocks, and some vegetation. Then right at the back it had an embroidery piece on a large stand that was absolutely gorgeous. It was strange everything being completely white, but it still made the boards of work stand out since the colour scheme was dark brown.

In the next room, which was also site specific. It had a large wall piece that went all across one side of the large room, and then an embroidery piece at the end of it that kept with the dark brown colour scheme. Then there where cases filled with some smaller pieces of work, and pieces of work then hanging off small metal cylinders that come out of the side of the cases... I`m not too sure if I even explained that in a way that people can actually understand.
Her work is impressive, and I loved the scale of it all; but it didn`t quite affect me on a level that the other artists did.


Marguerite`s work is something that I hadn`t actually experienced before and it was very, very strange to experience. At first I even put a status on facebook just saying that I didn`t even know how to react to the piece.
To begin with, a whole room had been turned into two corridors. You just walk down and turn left and then walk down that one and there`s just pure light coming through a rectangle door. The corridor area is pitch black and only has some small blue-ish lights coming from the edges of the ceiling. Within the corridor are loud and weird sounding noises, to be more straight forward the corridor plays a choir of 108 billion voices. These 108 billion voices re-enact the time our ancestors gained the morphing gene FOXP2, FOXP2 was a gene which allowed our ancestors to be able to develop speech.
So, as you walk down this corridor you can hear these weird and strange noises coming from every direction; but it`s nothing like anyone talking, it`s even lower than baby level speech and there`s so many of them going off at the same time that it`s almost overwhelming.

When you walk through into the next room, through the seriously bright rectangular door. You find a large room with salmon pink walls, and boxes with large white sculptures on top.
In this room, she explores elephants, yes; she explored the possibility of elephants becoming sentient beings, instead of us humans. So basically, if humans hadn`t of evolved into knowledgeable creatures with feelings and emotions, would elephants? I`m not too sure if it was like Elephants would be the dominant creatures on earth if it wasn`t for humans, or If they just gained the FOXP2 gene instead of humans.
To then explore the idea of elephants gaining the gene, there is a serious of different elephants throughout the room that are all doing completely different things and are expressing different feelings.

Unfortunately, none of these images

will be in order due to how quickly
I was trying to update, if you want
to see all of the elephants, then google the
artist and have a look at some of her work

online.

The centre elephant, is one that is sculptured in a way that makes it look like it`s taking it`s final breathes, and the noises it creates are unsettling. This ones called Echo.

There`s a series of three at the opposite side of the room, and these three are built in such way that makes it seem like their larynges have dropped so they sing in an articulate language that sounds really strange... Not unsettling, but strange. These three are called Edwina, Amelia and Antonia.

This is Echo, the elephant who

is currently taking it`s final

breaths.

There`s another one which was almost creepy to walk past, I was leaning right over the box that the sculpture was sat upon so I could get a better look at it. Enid, is programmed to cry out of sadness.

There was only one elephant that wasn`t making any noise whatsoever and it was the only one that didn`t have tubes or speakers coming out of it. It`s called Jean and it watches the others in "a sense of wonder".

One of them made some seriously strange noises as you walked around it, and was almost in sync with the other one right next to it. Felicie is engineered in such a way that it`s drunk, and the noises it`s making are from it being drunk from ethanol which comes from the masala fruit.

The front of Echo.

One of them kept on making very heavy breathing sounds and then made an eruptive noise. Emmett is made to be aggressive and loud, and made me jump a few times.

A quite one, was by the one that made no noise and also behind the aggressive one. Bastein is a foetus being born, and it made quite whining kind of noises aswell as breathing sounds.

Throughout the room, you could constantly hear loud heart beating noises, that where literally non-stop. But because the corridor that was blacked out was right next to the pink room full of elephants, you could also hear the choir of 108 billion voices along with the sounds of the elephants.

I seriously cannot describe the way that the elephant pieces made me feel, it was seriously strange to walk around witness.
the piece was amazing, yes, I`m not saying that it was bad in any way, definitely not saying that because I was honestly blown away with what I saw because I only thought it was going to be a small range of sculptures.

It was strange to witness I guess, and upsetting in some way; when I first walked in I just though "wow, this is amazing". But after sitting in there for ten minutes I just thought about how they where feeling and why these noises where coming out of them, and the noises where just like something I`d never heard ever before. Sitting In there for ten minutes also made me feel like I wasn`t quite supposed to be in there, like I was intruding.

It was a mixture of weird emotions just from being in that room and seeing those sculptures made me feel slightly in-easy, and made my head slightly confused. It was definitely amazing, eye-opening and made you think about the piece. It was brilliantly effective and I bloody loved it.

if your around Nottingham or just passing through, it`s by the Broadmarsh shopping centre and is free entry. Also, look up the artists and have a good look at both of them, it`s actually Marguerite`s first major solo exhibition so it`ll also be good too look at her previous work before this exhibition.

I also apologize for not putting up all of the images, and for not putting up the ones that I do have in the right order. you`ll be able to find them all on the Facebook page later on in the day!

Thanks for reading everyone! I`ll be updating again very, very soon!


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Induction weeks are finally over!

Now guys, the reason I haven`t been updating that much whilst I`ve been at university is actually incredibly simple:
I feel like the work I`ve been producing isn`t at the same level then, all of my other work throughout sixth form.

This was my desk just before we
had our annual review last

Friday.

It`s that simple, I`ve been making myself time to blog and produce work on my laptop and stuff, and I now fit in a few hours every night and I`ve now got my blogger account connected to my boyfriends laptop so I can blog whenever I`m at his flat during the week.
So it isn`t time at the moment, it`s just finding things to now blog about; I though I`d have plenty to blog about now I`ve gone off to university... But it`s actually proving to be slightly difficult.

So we began by just working with photoshop work for a whole week, and to say I used to work on photoshop quite a bit and I did enjoy it all for quite some time; then coming to University and having to do it for the first time in like 7 months, it proved quite difficult. so all of my edits where quite quick and didn`t actually show any skill whatsoever.

The week after that was even worse for me, we had to work with paper and cardboard. which as stupid as it`ll sound, is something that I`ve never worked solely with. At Sixth form we where always told to experiment with different materials and to never just stick with plain materials. But that meant that we never went back to basics and worked with things just as simple as paper and cardboard. I just did a lot of plain looking work since I wasn`t quite sure on as to what I should do for the entire week. My work wasn`t very good, I can promise you that.

The week after that, we had to work with thick metal wire and re-create our objects from that wire. For starts the wire was seriously hard to bend and manipulate, so it became seriously hard to try and bend everything into the correct shapes. I`ve never worked with just plain wire aswell, so I ended up struggling to create things out of wire aswell.
The wire week was less successful than the paper and card week that I did prior. If you look at the top image aswell, the wire work is at the top of my wall, the paper work is on the table and the photoshop work that I did is tucked away in the sketchbooks that I have.

But then after these three weeks, we had to work with two of those mediums to create more work through combining them together to make a serious of work. I only ended up making about 8 pieces of work, and they had to be finished my our annual review day.
We had the annual review on the Friday, and I have to say, I feel like mine didn`t go too well. Considering all of the work I`ve produced and the fact that I`m now on my second journal for my University work, I still felt like what the lecturers where saying is that I need a reason for all of my work and I can`t just keep on producing things without a reason.
But in my mind, the reason for producing all of that work was that they had told me that I need to of produced it by Friday.

I`m not sure as to how I feel about the review day, I thought some of my work was good and some wasn`t; but that`s just because I don`t work with those materials, and this has been very, very strange for me.
I`m happy with all of the journal work I`ve been producing and tomorrow I need to get even more done since I got all of my work ready for printing out. I might not be able to get that many more journal pages finished though; this upcoming week I`ll be working with casting.

Hopefully throughout the next week I`ll have plenty to be talking about then!

University Journal Pages!

So then guys, it`s been a while again, and I do have my reasons!
The university load is huge, and I`m working my ass off once again.


If you don`t keep up with the live diary blog then here`s a quick break down:
I`m timetabled in every weekday, 9am till 5pm and I have to travel quite a bit to get there each and everyday. Along with being there all day, I`ve also got to stay behind or go home and just do Journal work for a few hours. Luckily they have free Wifi at the university, so it`s easy to do Journal research.

But I just haven`t had a lot of time to myself lately, when I get home at night I just sit and do nothing because I`m so tired, I just don`t want to do anything in my spare time.

So then, after I`ve been at University for four weeks and I`ve done quite a bit already... Well I feel like I have.

We had an Acclimatisation week where we just got to know each other and get to know the studios a bit more, and then for three weeks we`re experimenting with simples materials. So far I`ve done Photoshop and paper and card work; tomorrow I`m beginning to work with wire for the week.

However, I also haven`t been very well... At this moment in time I`ve been doing journal work all day long whilst everyone's had a good day out in Matlock. I`m too ill to go out right now, I`m showing all of the symptoms of a chest infection and pneumonia, I`ll live though.

It probably sounds stupid, but the Journal work is the most time consuming, every little thing you produce has to be documented, every artist you like has to be documented, any songs or films you like has to be documented... Basically just document every time you blink or breathe.

Then because of all of the documenting, I`ve almost completely filled an A4 sketchbook full of work from just over four weeks, I`ve got a very thin book that has larger images of my photoshop work and the card work, then I`ve got a quick sketchpad, Then a small Contextual Reference book and a small journal for sketching on the bus, or when I`m just walking around.
Our course leader, Carl, likes the idea of drawing different things but in the same location; most probably after learning about an artist who draws different people on the bus every single day and documents them all in a little sketchpad.
The journals are extremely important for University, just to get a good pass rate for this first year, we`ll need about three filled Journals; it`s even harder for me because mine are A4 size and most people have just got A5 size.

I`ve almost finished the journal, I`m just swamped with work at the moment. You can find pictures from University on my Instagram account and if you click on the images above then they should appear larger for you!
See everyone soon!


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