Thursday 11 February 2010

Feb 2010 Update.














Nov 2009 - This was the start of my first main project as a 1st year. The brief was to create designs for a fashion fabric using drawing, disperse printing and Illustrator. I had to hand in 5 50x50cm drawings, 3 A3 Illustrator images and 6 to 8 A2 size disperse printed fabrics. We had approximately 6 weeks to do this, with two week rotating workshops in each discipline. The subject as you can probably tell, was flowers. My favourite being a hydrangeawhich was quite hard to get away from drawing. I decided to produce a Man's fashion fabric rather then a womens, looking at 18th Century mens clothing as inspiration.














Jan 2010 - This was the start of a short four week artist book project. This year is the 13th Annual Artist Book Fair in Leeds and Glasgow. As usual our college has several stands for the exhibition and our brief was to produce an artist book based around a chosen object and a series of repeat patterns bound into a seperate book.


My artist book was based around a vinyl figure I was bought whilst on a trip to Los Angeles in 2007. I decided to base my artist book on my trip to Los Angeles and the format of my book was a map. I screen printed a layout of the places I'd been to, along with illustrations and descriptions. I then worked back into the screen print with pen and ink. My time in L.A was bright and sunny and I wanted my images to reflect this.






 I looked at memory maps to give me ideas and also looked at the way maps are folded so I could mimic the folds for my finished map. Lastly I attached a cover with ribbon to keep the map closed. I'm really proud with how it looks. 












 In keeping with the look of my artist book I bound all my drawings, research and prints with corresponding covers and titles using the Japanese binding technique which works really well on seperate pages.






 As well as my map I also produced two mini artist books. These mini books contain only two loose pages with lino prints of an avocado and an avocado sushi roll. The books are called 'From Fruit to Roll.' One has green covers with brown prints and brown sash holding the pages together. The other has cream covers, green print and green sash. The title of the books are letters punched into copper plate, fixed to the covers.


I'm really looking forward to the exhibition. Our college has also been invited to show at the artist book fair in Amsterdam. Having a love of books means I've been really interested in the project and I feel it's something I would like to get involved with in the future.

Feb 2010 - Now the artist book project has been handed in it's time to research for the next project which is wallpaper. I was lucky enough to attend a special talk at Temple Newsam recentlyThey are currently showing an exhibition of wallpaper called Wonderwall. The curator spoke to us about the history of wallpaper and gave us a tour of the exhibition. We also had talks from Allyson McDermott on reproducing historic wallpapers and Paul Simmons from Timourous Beasties. Have to say Paul was a really nice guy, really interesting and I took a lot from his talk. It gave me ideas for my current project and how I might want to take my practice in the future.