Thinking About My New Project; Photography Session!

It`s five days till Christmas now...And I`ve genuinely been pretty bored, I get bored when there`s nothing for me to do that stimulates my brain and keeps me busy.

Seeing as we`ve been given a rather generous 5 weeks off of University and I`ve already been given the next module that I`ll be work on. So over Christmas, we`ve got to think about what we`re going to do and what we`re going to base our next module on.

I`ve thought about it quite a bit.
I think I might be going back to my year 13 roots, where I worked with meting plastic, setting work on fire and just being a messy person, who got told off quite a bit for being too messy... Seeing as I`m in a University environment, I thought that right now would be an amazing time to go back to trying out my messy ways.I have to admit though, I was seriously stumped for ideas so I`m also going back to my year 13 project, which was all about The Decay Of Nature; I want to do the same project but have another take on the subject.

To begin our module, we have to think of just two words as our starting point; the first word has to be the form of work, so that for me will be Mixed Media. Then the second word it the content; so for me I`m going with something like waste/human waste.

Instead of focusing more on the nature side of this project, and how we dump our man made waste and destroy the environment worldwide.
I`m making this project a lot closer to home, to begin with, I`ve been photographing the nutbrook trail which is a very common place for nearby fly-tippers. To begin with, it was actually pretty clear down there; usually there`s a lot of waste left near the quitter areas of the trail and it`s quite disgusting to see.

Seeing as it was quite clear down there, I decided to go and take my photography somewhere else.
A place that I go quite a bit actually to work on some small photography bits, It`s hidden through a fence that leads you behind the nutbrook trail.If you`ve seen this blog before, then you`ll know that a long time ago I used a lot of different images of the train tracks that are down there. However, I didn`t want to focus on the tracks at all this time, Instead I went the opposite way and ended walking around amongst a lot of bushes and trees.

It was quite sad in away, amongst the, now dead, bushes, there was so much cr*p just scattered around.
There used to be a huge factory down there, like an extremely long time ago; so they knocked it down and left the train tracks there. Because it`s private land, and it`s quite a large area of land, no one is ever down there and there are no longer security who go around and see if anyone is down there.
So people go through the fence, walk around for ten minutes and then just dump a bag of cr*p wherever they feel like.

Even though the land is abandoned, it did have a large factory and there is quite a bit of rubble left over from when they knocked it down; but that doesn`t mean that anyone can go down there and dump a load of cr*p from their back garden.

So anyways, I took about 156 photos when I was down there, and I must of been down there with David for almost 2 hours. The weather wasn`t too bad, just a bit chilly, but it was rather muddy down there and I might of got my boots seriously covered in mud... They may need a good clean.

Along with the 156 photos that I took on my Canon camera, I took two large carrier bags down with me. During mine and Davids walk, and after photographing some of the waste, I filled one with plants, dead leaves, twigs and sticks; these are just for crushing down and using as base materials for my work. Then in the other carrier bag, after I`d photographed the waste, I simply picked it up and popped it into the bag if it looked clean enough to go in there. a lot of it only had a bit of mud on that was easily dusted off, so I just filled the bag until it was too heavy for me to carry around... Then it was handed over to David since he is a whole lot stronger than me.

I managed to pick up quite a bit of waste whilst I was done there which I think is really good for my first walk; old wires, parts of computers, plastic sheets, plastic piping, etc.
I will need to start working wit these at some point though seeing as they are both just sat in bags in my room waiting to be used, and the bags where very large and they are taking up a lot of room on my desk... I also picked up a bag yesterday and I hadn`t realized that something I picked up must of been wet, so I had to clean up a little puddle of extremely dirty water that the bag had been sat on for some time.

So overall, I think I have things planned out for over the holidays; It`s just some old wood that I now have to source. My  journal is up to date; I`ve been to two gallery exhibitions within Derby, the Teamlab exhibition at the Quad and the Derby Museum Retro TV show exhibition. The only work I can see doing in there now is probably some small sampled of mixed media work and probably all of the photography that I completed during this session.

That`s it for this update!
Updates will probably slow down now over Christmas since I won`t be producing that much art work from now on... Perhaps some small little bits that probably have nothing to do with this project, and maybe a few little bits that lead up to more planning for the next project; but I`m afraid they`ll now slow down for a little bit now...
HAVE A GOOD CHRISTMAS!!!



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Last Three Weeks; Resolved Work!

It does look kind of messy from this

angle, I`m terrible at taking photos.

Since it`s been a week since I updated about my last three weeks at university, I thought I would try and explain my final resolved pieces of work.

Seeing as I didn`t know what to do with the prints, and that my frame of work was to work within a box or within a frame; I was pretty lost for the first two weeks of work, and during the third week, the last week, I had a huge panic and had to talk to the tutors about what I could possibly do.

I began to mess around with simply wrapping boxes with the prints that I made, and then the prints that where on thin plastic sheets where put inside so you can see the messages... I think I`ve already talked about this before.
But in the end that just didn`t work, and the sheets wouldn`t stay in place and it just didn`t work out correctly which was unbelievably frustrating.

That idea went out of the window quite quickly, I had to just leave the plastic sheets alone and they`ve just sat in a folder floating around my workspace. I never actually used the plastic sheets in the end, I thought I would be able to find a use for them with my box idea but that went out of the window again.

After working with the layered sheets and the boxes that they sat in, I spoke to Dennis and Jeremy and they both agreed with leaving my work as just regular boxes.
At first I made some small practice boxes that looked quite colourful and had been printed on to newspaper, It was the inks that I had used that made them look too bright and vivid for what I was going to do.

So, one of the main ideas as that we switched the coloured inks to just plain black and then we print on to white, then another idea was that we use white ink and then print onto black paper.
I managed to get quite a few examples of that done, and a few small boxes covered in them finished. But then when I put them all together they looked nicely finished and refined but in-finished.
So the white on black, and black on white prints where good examples but then they didn`t work in the end... Like almost everything else I`d been experimenting with.

After the discussion with Dennis and Jeremy and after going through what I could possibly do, we did discuss possibly printing on to wrapping paper.
The idea behind this is a bit weird; when you go on your phone and you`ve received a message you would expect it to be from your friend or family member who`s just chatting to you or just wants to see how your doing. So really, you expect it to be something nice; which is where the present idea comes in.
You expect a nice message and not something that`s harassing and degrading, and you expect it to be from someone you already know; not some weird 52 year old man who wants to know if you enjoy "anal".

So, after having such a basic idea of working with small boxes, we decided to go forward and begin to print on top of wrapping paper. The idea is that we`ve turned something that`s supposed to be friendly and nice to you, into something that`s harassing and disgusting.

So from turning messages from something personal, private and welcoming; we`ve now turned presents into the same kind of thing. Presents that are supposed to be nice and giving, have been turned into boxes that are harassing and are basically taking the piss out of you.

The printing onto wrapping paper idea worked really well and the prints came out quite clean. I used mostly black inks on the brown paper and the gold and pink paper. The calligraphy font worked really well especially on the gold.
Something fancy, pretty and attractive looking was turned into something that`s harassing and unsettling to see.

Basically, I winged it.
Because of the framework that we had to work within, and because we had to work with what we had done over the past nine weeks; I was seriously stuck for ideas.
If I was just left to do whatever I wanted with my final thing/resolved piece then I feel like I would of been able to produce a much better final piece.

We`ve been given the next module to be working on over the holidays, so I`m hoping that over Christmas I can get quite a bit of work finished to then take back over the holidays.
My next project, is hopefully going to be a lot better than this one, I`ve enjoyed being inducted into the whole studio environment but I want to get on with my own work now we`ve got this project over and done with.


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Last three weeks; Print Work!

 

After working with sound for a week in a freezing cold church in the middle of Derby, we only had three weeks left of university. I have finished and handed in all of my work now, I`ve just found the time to be able to upload some of my print work here for everyone to see!

But first I need to give everyone a bit of context since my work was seen a slightly offensive by some people.

At the beginning of the year we all bought objects in, three of the same; and you would of read about this in previous posts aswell.
We`ve been working with those same objects for like 11 weeks now, and we`re all getting pretty bloody sick of them too. So for the last three weeks of our first semester, we where told to work with our objects and put them into Context, my objects where three different phones.
So for my items, I thought about what our generation uses the most when on their phones; which is obviously social media. That`s literally all we use our phones for these days, so I used social media to put my phones in to context.

But what`s the first thing you`ll think of when it comes to social media? Celebrities, selfies, group photos, Instagram? Well, I didn`t want to focus on self-image and the way we see ourselves and others when online. Instead, I focused on what we get in response to putting our images online. To get a response, I`ve been using facebook a lot more, Instagram and Meetme like seriouslyyyy active in order to get a response out people.
These aren`t rude or inappropriate selfies at all, These are just normal day to day messages that I receive, that`s almost everyday. The only thing is that I now just see these messages as normal because I receive quite a lot of them on Meetme.

So then, to put my phones into context, I began to start collecting the messages I was being sent on a daily basis. Looking through them was seriously strange, I got so many weird creepy ones from people who where like 40 years plus!
I haven`t even replied to these, I`ve literally just opened the messages, taken a screenshot and then closed it again. In one day I tried to delete all of the messages I got from the day before and there was 74 messages that I deleted, 74 messages in one day just for uploading a selfie of myself!

So, I had my context, and some messages to begin working off. But then I needed to find my form of producing the work.
We where given a framework to work within, or work around. So Carl (head of the course), said that the framework should just be that we use the techniques we`ve been working with for the past 9 weeks; printing, plaster, wood and metal, etc. Then Dennis and Jeremy come along with they`re meeting, and then everyone got it into their heads that we had to work purely with a box shape.

It was quite frustrating since Carl did seem somewhat laid back about what we needed to do, and the Dennis and Jeremy seemed very straight forward when it came to working within a box or a boxed frame. It`s frustrating because Dennis and Jeremy seem to conflict with Carls ideas and plans.

Anyways, I began to print quite a bit; I managed to get about 75 prints done on to plastic sheets, packaging sheets and newspaper paper, (also some black card for experiments). I did really produce that many coloured prints, and the ones that where coloured where then used for practice pieces for my work.

I initially had this idea of working with a box, covered in the harassing/inappropriate messages and then have plastic sheets inside that all of have prints on them. Kind of like a layering effect with the plastic and through each one you can see new messages appearing.

But then that idea was scrapped, I managed to do quite a few practice pieces for that Idea and I worked with creating different sized boxes. I must of used about 7 different screens with different texts on them. Three of the screens didn`t even work, so I spent ages putting them on and then taking them off to then try and put them back on again. I also messed around quite a bit with the way the text was laid out, and what messages I was going to use to put the texts together. So there was so many weird little tests I did with words I pulled out from messages, and quite a few bothered Carl a little bit; whenever I talked about it, he seemed slightly concerned about what was coming through on my phone.



I`m going to upload some more Print work on here, then in the next update I`m going to show you my semi-final/resolved piece of work that I used all of the prints for.
Also, it links in with Christmas!

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Sound Work from St.Werburghs Church!

For the past week, the first year Fine Art group had to work in a 850 year old church that had no heating or lighting inside whatsoever.

Within this week, we where all put into groups, and our teacher Caroline made it pretty easy by just leaving us with the people we sat down with when we went to our first lecture with her. So I was luckily with Liam, Richard, Alicia and Sophie; all of whom I get along with really well and we all worked really well in a group together.

To begin with we had to book loads of equipment out of the Equipment Centre; now if there are any damages to the items we borrow then we can be fined up till £2500 each, and if anything is a day over due, you can be charged up to £30 per day.

We where struggling with booking out equipment, we had quite a few problems actually... For starts, everything was already booked out. I managed to get out the MacBook, but no projector. And we`d already began to work on stuff with the projector. So no projector, but we managed to book out some lighting. When I picked up the lights on Tuesday, the lights I wanted had apparently broken so I couldn`t have them; instead of the flood lights, yes a floodlight, so they gave me red heads 8000. When we got them back to the church, we where given a set of three but just one was too bright for the room and we had to take them back on the same day.

The only items we had no problems with was the MacBook and the speakers.

We spent Monday starting the basic editing, and then the Tuesday was more about setting up our spaces and testing out what we`d made the day before.
Friday we had our final presentations, where we had to play our work in front of the whole class. It was seriously weird to have everyone in our year stood in a tiny dark room with no lighting whatsoever. We just had our sound work playing really, really loudly to try and portray what it was we wanted.

Our work was supposed to portray what it`s like for a blind person to go about everyday life. Which is why we wanted to use a tiny bit of lighting either with projections or large lighting within the room. We read books on blind people and read things online about what blind people can see, that`s if they have a little bit of sight left.
Because the original lights had broken, and the others where way too bright to even use. Me and Liam devised a little plan to try and use the flash on our cameras, which we had struggled to time right cause we both randomly tried to use our flashes at different random times.

It was seriously hard to do, I`d never even worked with sound before, and at Sixth form, we never even worked in groups and everything we did was individual stuff.
This was a seriously tough week... I also messed up quite a bit by going out Thursday night and hen not getting any sleep whatsoever back at Davids flat. I still managed to make it in, only just though. I was seriously sick after going out, but I crawled back in about 10am to help my group. I gave them everything so they could get on with the presentations, I felt like I would of just vomited everywhere if I got up and went in on time, it was horrible.

I`m happy I managed to get in, my lecturer said she would of been disappointed because of the amount of work we`ve been putting into what we`ve been doing.
I would of been pretty disappointed in myself to be honest, we`ve all worked our arsses off this week and that Church is a lovely place, but horrible to work in. It was hard, and I feel like everyone else`s work was better than ours in the end. Ugh, I`m never working with sound again... It was sooo frustrating to do.

I`m not sure if I can upload the sound file, it would be really cool if I could though; the recordings in it are taken  from our everyday lives, conversations and activities in the studios. So everything we did was our own work, and it took us a long time to collect all of that together in time for this week.

I`ll see if I can upload the sound work, if I can`t... Then I`m sorry!!




CLICK HERE FOR THE AUDIO OF THIS PROJECT!



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Wood Work! (light box)

The inside when complete looked better than the outside!

In our last week of induction work within a bunch of workshops that we`ll probably never go into again... we had to work with wood or metal.

According to everyone else who had already done this workshop, it was apparently boring as hell so I already wasn`t looking forward to what we where going to have to produce during the week. The idea was that we all start off by making something seriously simple, which was just the frame for a box... That was it, make a frame for a box and then work within it with materials of your choice.

So, because I`m not a fan of woodwork or metal work and everyone else is, I decided to go straight with wood and get on with it. No faffing around, well I thought so until I got a different idea. Within our work, we still had to work with one of the objects that we bought in at the beginning of the year; so if we all go back to the last update and remember; mine was three phones.

But that didn`t mean I was going to create a phone out of wood... no, no, no way was I going to spend a week creating that. The only thing was with my idea, two other people had already done similar things with their boxes and I didn`t want it to seem like I had copied or was going for something simple.

With my work, I wanted to create a lightbox. A box with lights in, seriously that simple. But, it was too simple so I came up with something a little bit different.
The box I was made only had two small wooden frames to keep it together, two sides of normal wood and then four sides of wood with holes all over them. Inside the box I was going to put my screen prints onto plastic and then the lights... If that even makes any sense. This meant that when you look through the holes, you can see the keyboard screen print because of the lights.

It did make my piece a bit more interesting, considering everyone else was literally just making a normal box. I can`t really say much about the process, I had to use a series of machines that had circular blades to cut out the holes, a bandsaw to cut the sides of the box and then having to go back to the screen printing studios to add the prints.
The only thing I can really say is that all of the wood for the frames was attached together with a drill and screws, then the sides managed to stay in place with simple nails and a hammer. There isn`t really anything to talk about, I must of gone for the most simple idea I could of possibly come up with on the spot.

Oh well, I still managed to impress my lecturer Dennis; I think if I went for anything more "creative" then I wouldn`t of really enjoyed the week and I might of given up so much sooner than I did. I even got that bored that I took the Wednesday off really, I did no work for the wood project but a lot of work for a sound project that`s coming up... yes, another project.

I`m beginning to think the projects are seriously never ending during your first year, it`s hard and complicated to get your head around the timetables. We`ve done a plain induction week to the course, a whole week of drawing, a week of working with paper, a week with wire, a week with photoshop, a week combining two of those elements. Then from there, we moved onto a week of clay and plaster, a week of screen printing and a week of woodwork. Then we have a week of working with sound, and then three weeks to combine wood, printing or clay work.

It`s honestly confusing me...

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Printing Work!

So then, Last week we had to begin another three weeks of induction work. Last week, if you saw the update, then we had to take part in a clay and plaster workshop that quite frankly took a long time to finish off.

This week, we gladly got to work on printing; but we only actually got around to doing one form of printing because we had to go to Oxford... yes, Oxford, I should of updated about that like last Wednesday, but I was exhausted and never got round to actually doing it. so that`ll be coming soon.


We only managed to get round to making some screen prints, a very basic form of printing that involves one screen with the same image on it; you repeatedly drag a mixture of paint and binder through the screen and it then prints on to the paper or material underneath.

You coat a silk screen (what they used to be called but apparently the ones at university are made out of cotton), with printing emulsion. The emulsion is this horrible thick gloopy stuff that you coat the screen in, it also doesn`t feel nice when you get it on your hands.

After the screen has been coated, we use this weird heated cupboard that dries everything a lot quicker for us. You leave it in there and start this whole process when you have an image, don`t ever leave it in there when you aren`t prepared to put the image on; the screen just bakes and then the emulsion that you coated on there just crumbles off.

The image then needs to be put on a UV ray box, then get the screen and place it face down onto the box; but you can`t let the screen be in the light for so long, because then it just exposes itself after a while. The machine that we have at university has to be on a setting of 130 seconds of exposure if you have your image on a piece of plain white paper, or, 30 if the image is on acetate.

Once it`s been quickly adjusted and is ready to go; you pull down the lid which is basically thick black fabric that let`s no light out of the Ray box and no light in. Ensure that it`s clamped down properly and then press the vaccum button; this just helps make sure that nothing else will obscure the picture in anyway. It`s quite fun to watch and do now, before I didn`t trust myself even touching the machine, simply because it`s that big and make some horrible noises after a while.



 The only step that you have to do after that is go through to the blaster rooms, and blast off the emulsion that you put on the screen; the only parts that should come off are, the areas where your image has come through when you exposed the screen to it. Just keep on spraying until you feel like it`s all come through. You can then just keep on printing as many times as you want, with as many different colours as you want. To remove the screen you have to use a special mix of chemicals that eat away at the emulsion on the screen; I can`t remember the exact name for the chemicals, but you simply leave it on for a few minutes and then use a proper jet washer to blast off the rest of it. If you`ve mixed the right amount of chemicals or if you`ve left it on long enough, then it`ll come off really easily with some blasting.



If you remember, a while ago I began to use a horrible old Blackberry phone with ridiculously small buttons; this was one of the images that I kept on printing, and was the first image that I`ve put on screen at university. I did put another one on eventually, but that one was used for mainly colour experimentation.

I began with some simple prints, Black with some blobs of purples and blues; which blended in nicely wit the black. after that, I worked on some coloured prints, but then printed black back over the top of them; This made the prints look like they where echoing, like the top layer was actually the shadow. Then a lot of the others where over laps of Cyan, Blue and Yellow paints; the exact colours which are used to create images on phones and newspapers.


This whole process was really fun, and everything at Derby University to do with printing is free to use to any students; as long as they`ve had the proper inductions for the machines in there.

There`s clamps to keep the screens in place, so you can lift up the screen, change the paper and keep on printing! Some of them are now on Deviantart, I won`t be putting them all on facebook, I usually just upload photography on there now.

Keep checking for more updates!

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