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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