Results Time!

I did it! I survived the Final Major Project and finished the foundation course. I was nominated for ‘Best in Show’ of the 400 or so entries, and I won the pathway award for the Part-time foundation course. The last hurdle was the results, and I am chuffed to reveal that I got a distinction! I am relieved, exhausted, burnt out; and very, very proud. Thankyou to everyone for all the kind wishes and congratulations I have received, it means a lot.

 

Assessment Time!

Well the piece is now up in the gallery at AUCB and all the hard work is done. All I have left now is my assessment which is today! I am meeting with the ‘powers that be’ at 2.30pm. I am a bit nervous, although I now feel that whatever mark I get I did my best (My mum always says that’s as much as anyone can ask, so lets see!) I am really chuffed that I was given a space in the gallery, it is very flattering that the tutors have such faith in what I am producing.

Below are a couple of shots taken by my very good friend (and partner in crime) Samantha Brightwell.

Marks come out on June 1st, so I will let you know when I do. However, I have already accepted a place on the Fine Art Degree course at AUCB so whatever the outcome my life for the next 5 years has been decided. ( Yes that’s right, I did say 5 years! The price you pay for studying while having two children, and a part-time job, it’s just aswell I enjoy it as much as I do)  Wish me luck!

Scary Times!

Another tutorial tomorrow  arghh! I have to hand in a sketch of my proposal so that spaces in and around uni can be allocated for the exhibition, there’s no going back now!

Tutorial

Finally got to talk through how my ideas have progressed with a tutor this week, and I am really pleased with how it went. All in all he liked where my idea had come from and how it had progressed through into an abstract ‘fine art’ piece. We also had a very interesting discussion about the value of information being given up front when in the realms of fine art; or whether it is right to have a clear concept in your own mind that you are still happy for others to interpret as they wish. At the moment I am still deciding whether or not to add more information. My gut reaction is a big fat NO, but I feel it would be wise to go through the motions and experiment with some of the possibilities I have been thinking about.

One idea is to work with the words I came across that categorise people within certain areas. Some statements are very pc, others not so much! There might be some potential in including how people are categorised rather than simply that they are?

Below are some initial experiments with how I could include different text………………………

                                                                               

I am uncomfortable with using the text, now that I see it in situ. The piece is not about preaching the rights and wrongs of people’s opinions, and I don’t want the work to end up telling a story.

Another angle that I have been considering is the idea that people’s category may be fixed and determined by the maps but the individual, or the area can change. This will be most apparent when the viewer looks at the piece and can see their reflection within different pigeon holes as they move. Equally places are capable of change. The obvious example would be somewhere like London, where previous areas considered ‘undesirable’ places to live suddenly become the next best thing and move into the category of ’up and coming’. Property sky rockets, investment comes flooding in and lo and behold the whole area is newly classified as ‘least deprived’; but what happens to the people who live there? Have all their circumstances changed aswell? 

It was recommended to me that I watch the classic 1930′s film ‘Night Mail’ with regards to a visual that might work with this idea of change of circumstances. The documentary is about a steam train that runs from London to Glasgow, in the 1930′s, delivering mail in the excess of 500  million letters each year. It is in the methodical approach of that delivery that my next consideration comes from. There were hundreds of pigeon holes within the train that were used for sorting the letters, and on the fronts of these the names of the towns that the train was approaching would be written in chalk. Once those letters had been sorted the name would be rubbed off and another written in its place.

It may seem trivial or obvious that this would have happened but in terms of the feeling that I am trying to create with my piece it could work really well.

I liked the smudged chalk after each name had been rubbed off. However, in keeping with this being a modern-day situation I was not sure that this material would be appropriate. I then did a sample with pen. I managed to get the ghost of the previous towns name to show behind, but I really prefer the chalk.

This material lends itself to being removed and changed easily, and I think that is important in its quality. Another decision that I have made is to work with the three generic colours I mentioned in the previous blog. You can see from the smaller image on the right I have managed to get some spray paints to match these colours. I will be using them at the back of the pigeon holes and on the swing tags. Whether I will be adding town names to them aswell I am reserving judgement until the piece starts to physically come together a bit more. (I ordered the mirrors earlier in the week and they are ready to be collected tomorrow, so that side of things should really start to come together. )

Pigeon Hole Installation

To reinforce my concept and to add that all important 3D quality to the piece, I have acquired some plastic coated, pigeon-hole styled, racking.

Just like the maps are becoming increasingly ineffective, this systematic, industrial, mail sorting, structure is fast becoming obsolete; as the world fully embraces the technological age of the email. Taking that into account, if I combine the reflective quality of the map shaped mirrors I think I might be getting somewhere with communicating the my idea.

I will be having a tutorial on Tues with an artist who specialises in 3D works. I am hoping that he will see some potential in what I have come up with so far ( fingers crossed!)

So that I can be as visual with my explanation as possible I have made some models. They are far from hi-tech, but hopefully the chicken wire will give him the general idea :o)

It’s really tricky to take photographs of mirrors, the proposal is for the vertical pigeon holes to have the mirror mapping reflect the viewer back at themselves. The whole of the back panel, of the structure that will be used, will show a large piece of mirror that has been etched to reveal the mapped areas of Dorset. These shapes will be linked in some places and separate in others, just like the original print I created. The racking should be displayed at a certain height so that the viewer can see the mirror map as a whole, encased within the structure.

I have always felt that I needed to include the three main generic colours of classification that are used within the demographic maps, especially as they seem to evoke such strong association from people when I used them previously. In both the images above I have been playing with ways of introducing the colours. The colour in the second image is hard to distinguish as I have coloured the chicken wire itself; it is too thin to show up on the photos and have any real impact.

 I tried the same technique with a spare shelf from the racking, which had much better results. I can see that by applying the colour in this way I can created a strong link to the grid reference system used in traditional maps. I am starting to get the impression that using the map itself may not be necessary. Is the mapped mirror shapes and coloured grid a strong enough reference on its own?

Moving Forward………………………

In my quest to inject some life into what can become quite a dry visualisation, I am trying to move my ‘mapping’ into the realms of installation/3D. I have been looking at the successes other artists have had within a similar field in order to get the creative juices flowing! Below are a couple of my favourites………

What I really love about this piece is how it is simple but effective. You have the obvious shape of a sphere representing the globe but also, by weaving the strips of the usually flat map of the world round and round into this shape, it gives it a sense of the world turning. The tantalising loose ‘thread’ speaks of how delicate the world can be, easy to unravel and take apart. This solid mass can be very easily pulled apart. I have no idea if my interpretation of the artists work is correct, quite often in fine art it is the individual perception that is most important. I find it all very inspiring!

I really must apologise for my terrible images, I am being lazy and photographed them straight out of the research pages of my sketchbook, note to self “must try harder!”

Thurle Wright’s Memory Box is another interesting piece that I discovered on the net. Once again the simple forms that have been used are minimal but very effective. The clue is obviously in the title but more than the artist mapping places that they have maybe visited or hold dear (Or even hold unhappy memories), it is about containment of those places. Whether it is because these places are stand alone experiences in their own right, or the cubes bringing reference to our memories being contained individually.

Seeing these works I realised that before I can move forward with my piece I need to decide what it is that I am mapping. Once that is decided I can drill down deeper into the visual of that concept. After looking over the past few weeks work I realised that I want to use mapping to highlight the uncomfortable notion of generalizing people to areas.

From deciding this I have made a huge leap forward with various different ideas about possible visuals I could use, and processes I could adopt. I feel the answer lies in creating a piece that will provoke a personal psychological response from people when they see it. The best way I can think of so far is to use the reflective quality of mirrored glass.

I started to etch the back of this small mirror so that I can start to recreate some of the shapes I mapped from the deprivation research I did within the county of Dorset. This process is slow, but with patience I think the finish will be crisp (which will be a necessity should I decide that this is what I take forward into the final exhibition). I really like the situation that the mirror presents. By blocking sections of the map and reflecting the viewer back at themselves I think it starts to speak of the potential involvement of everybody within these areas. Or maybe once again, my interpretation will not resemble that of anyone elses! I will need to show my peers at uni and gauge their collective response to see if this has any real potential.

I think on a larger scale this idea of mapping with the mirror could be really effective. Obviously once the larger mirror was hung/mounted vertically it would reflect the viewer rather than my radiator! The next step now is to look at whether the glass/mirror should be laid on top of the map itself or possibly look at involving the emotive demographic colours that I used previously. This could be a block of colour behind different sections of mirror, or maybe even exposing the coloured printed areas of the map and retaining the mirror effect everywhere else; similar to the image underneath…….

It’s difficult to see the reflective quality of the mirror in this photo, but you get the idea. I think I need to start making some small samples and models now, need to get more of a feel of how this idea can be presented as a stand alone piece.

Idea Progression…………………………..

Having spent the last 4 weeks collecting data and photographs my idea has started to develop with a printing exercise of mamouth porportions! The data that interested me the most came from some demographic council maps that measured multiple deprevation. Through looking at the various highlighted areas I became even more aware of the generlizing of both the areas and the people within them. I started to plot my findings on a very large ordinance survey map of Dorset and collecting quotes etc from various sources.

For a while there my living room looked like I was investigating a murder!

I then started the process of preparing the shapes I wanted to print onto the map via a method called screen printing. It is where you transfer your image onto a screen that has lots of tiny holes in it, and then push ink through those holes by dragging the ink across the screen using a squeegee. It is a process I have encountered before. I love how hands on it is! The two images below show how I had to measure and recreate the images in order to put them onto the silk screens at uni.

The end result wasn’t great in terms of finish, and it was a very long drawn out process. However, during the course of the printing people would approach to see what I was up to. After they had satisfied their compulsion to find where they lived they would start to look at the map in a different way. First they would notice the colours. I had deliberately used the palette prefered by the council for their visual recording of areas and their circumstances. The cool blue of the 20% least deprived areas Nationally, the moss green of ‘Middle England’ and the startling red of those areas that fall into the 20% most deprived Nationally. People were surprised by some of the classifications on the map; and that resulted in many discussions on how the data collected by the council can be distorted by a small minority into puting an area into a higher or lower catagory. That said, I started to feel differently about these maps. Was this type of visual representation helpful? Had this method of catagorization become inefficent and was edging towards becoming obsolete?

The first thing that struck me was how the blood red areas stood out like bullet holes! Red has always been used as a warning, of danger. The blue and green have an almost soothing quality. I am sure that it is deliberate, rather than just ironic, that some of these colours are easier to ‘live with’ than others.

After having a tutorial with the head of year, I went home with my map and mentally brought myself almost back to the beginning of my concept. What is it that I am mapping? Obviously I have physically mapped my geographical findings so far, but that is not enough. It doesn’t go deep enough into my concept of people and places being pigeon holed. My message is not evident in this map as a stand alone piece. 

So my next stage is to look deeper into my concept and what it is that I want to say. I need to take what I have created so far and move it forward from a geography project into ART!!!!!!!!

I am now working on a few ideas that should get me closer to that goal. Once I have some photos of the various design ideas and samples I am working on I will be back!