Developing from the Change of Heart.

The Process.

From the research collected at the Leicester Botanical Gardens and the Change of Heart Exhibition, I have been developing pieces in my sketchbook. I made observational drawings of the patterns and shapes in the garden. Designed sculptures, documented thought processes at the time and words that were important.

I then layered this information through the pages, one side and then the other repeating and translating the images over and over again incorporating the imperfections in the page and the drawings themselves.

Once I am happy with a composition I go over the lines in pen to give that page permanence and a crisp finish. These designs are still pieces of a jigsaw however, and I see them more as an adolescent piece waiting to grow into a bigger artwork once the correct pages fit together. The drawings can still develop through the unresolved pages of the book. These images contribute to the paintings by being traced through the paper of larger compositions, in this way the first hand references directly influence the final compositions, unfolding a history of growing marks and development.

Once I move onto the larger paper I repeat the process again this time aiming for a finishing composition. Tracing the directly observed and built up drawings into a larger lace-work. This then influences the next compositions by tracing the patterns through again. I am looking for interesting and familiar shapes at this point; an eye, a fish, a pod, from just using the marks I have I compose an image from what the patterns suggest.

The colours are from the place of origin, where the sketches began, the Botanical Garden in this case. I also use pressed flowers and leaves for a colour palette. Bringing the piece full circle and back to the earth and nature, its birth and its finish.

The Finished Artwork. Or is it?

Once an artwork has cross through the completed door, does it end, or will it continue? Will it create another artwork, inspire another person? Will it die to bloom again renewed, and simply never end.

A Change of Heart

Accepted as the Mentee Artist at the Leicester Botanical Gardens, I have been assisting in workshops with disabled children during the day and working as an Artist in Residence in the evenings. 

The Gardens are stunning; they have such character, impressive autumn colour and interesting plant structures, everywhere you look there is something new to be discovered.

The pond area has 'The Listening Bell' making a delicate trickling sound you have to really listen hard for amongst the fierce splashing of thee fountains. In the background there is the mirrored surface of 'Endymion II' by Susan Forsyth.

The Workshops

Inspired by the Sculpture Exhibition 'A Change of Heart' located throughout the Gardens a series of workshops were planned for classes throughout Leicestershire. The Schools picked from the list of workshops and decided upon drawing, painting, casting in clay and plaster. The workshops had to be suitable for the age and abilities of the children with the facilities prepared for wheelchair access and safety requirements.

During the workshops the class draws from the sculptures and plants they enjoy in the gardens. These pictures are then transferred to clay to make a cast in plaster, which is then painted.

Drawing in Clay and the Plaster Cast.

The Painted Cast.

Research and Experiments

After the workshops the artists have the time to progress in our own artistic research, with the view to producing artworks for the exhibition. I have been looking at the shapes and colours of the plants and leaves in the gardens. Exploring the hidden areas and even looking through the scraps in the compost bins!

Having brought the found objects I have been working on in the City to the Gardens, I am puzzling a way to combine the two. My objects are very mechanical and usually worked in plastics and metal, but are combined of whatever I can find at that time so are hard to join together and even harder to combine with organic material that will decompose.

I am looking to bring the found and insignificant objects of the city into the Gardens and vice versa. Weeds of the garden I have spray painted to become the graffiti of the flowerbed, this has caused quite a stir with the gardeners!

The cuttings of plants I have used to make sculptures from that will stand and decompose over time. Though I like the re-purposing of the garden scraps, The green on green does not stand out very well so if I produce such a sculpture for the gardens I would have to locate it well or spray it with another colour, this would tie it in with the found man made objects I use in the city sculptures.

As well as the Change of Heart Workshops a group of 11-18 year olds have been working with Soft Touch Arts and created amazing sculptures from wood that are now installed at the south end of the Botanic Garden. Their website is: http://www.soft-touch.org.uk/

The barcode next to each piece links the viewer to the webpage where the descriptions of the artist and artworks is for on the spot research.


More information about the Gardens and the events held there can be found on the website: http://www2.le.ac.uk/institution/botanic-garden

The Path of Drawing

I am between-places

Large sculpture is not feasible at this time, so I am returning to easily stored mediums that I can transport. Inks Papers Oils here.

The misty culture of the imagination crops up here, it appears that as a society we are no longer supposed to dream or imagine fantastical places, we have to work and come home and often there is no time left to play and create. Imagination is important but is not encouraged enough in the modern 'contemporary' world as we have no time to be still, to pause and appreciate our personal crafted dreams, so this is a glorification of the dream, the imagination, the places between.

Pen and Ink

I am exploring the insignificant marks on a page, the scuff marks and the way the page has trapped larger chunks of pulp in a random fashion. It is as though the page always wanted to be something more, knows what it will become and all of this is trapped inside the page, waiting. I pick the marks out in pen to start, this tends to be dots and bubbles, I then join these fragments together on both sides of the page tracing through patterns across many pages of sketches layering the images of research into the new work which in turn feeds the next artwork. 

Drawings and Photoshop

Wanting to experiment in colour and putting work on the web I have scanned in my drawings and coloured them in using Photoshop. The tools have produced interesting effects such as lighting and the use of 3D space from my 2D starting point by layering the works over each other.

Wirksworth Festival 2010

After the Degree Show I was asked if I would like to participate in the Wirksworth Festival 2010 Graduate Show in the Newbridge Building. I exhibited some of the sculptures from the degree show as the curators' asked but wanted to contribute more to the energy of the event, so encouraged by the staff I built new pieces from the scrap I found around the town. One of these pieces dubbed 'The Child Catcher' liked to move on the slippery floor collapsing and having to be shifted repeatedly capturing the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the materials. This has been a thrilling experience the video below shows some of the highlights and my work is in it!



For more information about the Wirksworth Festival visit http://www.wirksworthfestival.co.uk/

Wirksworth Festival - Graduate Exhibition

After the Degree Show I was asked if I wanted to be part of the Wirksworth Festival by one of their Commitee who had seen my work. IT IS SO EXCITING!! I finally get the opportunity to show large work outside the University! The initial request was for me to show the Degree Show work at the Newbridge Building but the space is huge and at least two of the other artists in the space have not been in touch to confirm their attendance. This has left a massive gap in in the already massive space that I have been asked to fill! If only I had been allowed this much space at University I would have been able to make more or larger pieces that I could use in this space now, oh well. After a talk with the on site organiser I have arranged to make more sculptures based on what I can find around Wirksworth, this all depends on what I can find, of course.

Day 1: Re-building the flat packed sculptures, I should have made this a performance, I feel like I am building a car with all these pieces lined up!! I am so pleased with the way I built the structures to condense down and this is the first time I have had a chance to test it out, I knew I would struggle for storage space and if I had destroyed the pieces I would have nothing to show here.

Day 2: Finishing off the building of the sculptures I am now trying to work out what combinations to put them into. The space dwarfs the small sculptures they were built to fit into the small University space not a warehouse but this is an interesting challenge, I could spread them out to emphasise their small scale or pile them together to make them seem bigger however that would scratch the paint and drawings off that I have just spent hours re-touching! And until the other artist arrive I don't know where to put the work, dilemma! I think the organisers must be pulling out their hair. I am going hunting for more Wirksworth scrap for the sculpture I am building; there is very little useful scrap lying around as most is rotted and would disintegrate if I tried to build with it.

Day 3: A sunny day, I like the light coming through the windows in this otherwise dark, strip-light lit place, I hope that the good weather holds out for the Festival. I am arranging the mirrors to catch the light and shine it onto the long landscape strip the light moves so fast though it is difficult to capture. In the above photo you can see the size of the place and though I am trying out positions I still don't know where the other artists are going to go!

I love this observatory structure with the mirrors reflecting the light to the other landscapes; is this the power source? A solar powerplant? An observatory or a reflection? A reflection of the self? A reflection of these large human behemoths strolling through lilliputian landscapes shattered into tiny little fragments by broken mirrors.

I find myself drawn to certain shapes over and over again; the Observatory, the Sail Boat, the angles in the stick-like legs of the Walkers. I found a large umbrella that echoes the angles only upside down, it is such an exciting shape to find although I try to not build with found wood incase it rots and drops to pieces on the audience. I am making an exception to this pressure treated wood but I am not building with it I want it to echo the linear shapes that the other Walkers have. A walker in construction perhaps? It seems I am making this into a process-display where the layout is in a factory style; found pieces to preparation to construction to finishing off, I believe this was suggested because the onsite staff like watching me build things but it is useful as I have no time to paint and draw on the new structures.

It is hard for me to see my own work or describe it, in hindsight I think I pick these objects because their texture, structure, motion or composition interest me not just their material properties in constructing larger pieces. Even the drawings on the surface have become something else to detract from the sculptural shapes and though I initially wanted the sculptures to be extensions of paper or wall, that was lacking in University for me to draw insignificance onto, I now see these objects as extensions of insignificance themselves, their own entity built magically from ignorance.

Day 3-4: Finding bits and building the Wirksworth sculpture. I have only found enough pieces for one larger sculpture as Wirksworth is a very tidy place! I managed to get some very interesting pieces from a fly-tipping location, the Newbridge Building itself and a field; the copper piping is very flexible but seems like it will hold the weight if it is not moved around too much. I have had a few suggestions at how to put it together which is fine so long as someone stays put to keep it together while I bolt it! I just hope it will hold together as I normally test the structures' stability over time but there is no time to see how this piece will settle. It is up now and hopefully it will stay up.

Day 5-6: Well I built the thing but the copper pipes are bending and sliding on the concrete from being moved so much; not sure how to stop it as the legs might snap off if I brace the base, I don't have any found pieces that I can use to strengthen it and I don't want to use bought materials. It sat perfectly fine until it was shifted this way and that around the new artists who only decided to show up 2hrs before closing to set up their artwork! How RUDE! Everyone thought they were not going to come at all and of course had moved work to compensate for the gaps which we had to rework to let them have space.

The Wirksworth piece has been dubbed the 'Child Catcher' after a discussion with the Camera man because of its large and unpredictable nature, I know it is going to fall down but I like this freedom to collapse, the teetering between found materials and unpredictable people, the tension. Though the piece looks heavy it is really very light, if a bit awkward to manoeuvre. I wonder whether I should pick it up to re-set it after a collapse so it can fall down again, the determination to come from nothing, to stand, to live, to survive! 

All set up and done, I hope it all goes well, I have enjoyed the excitement and the build up, to make something this big after university has been fantastic and the Wirksworth team are amazing. It is so exciting and has developed my understanding of what I want from my work even if I am still not sure how the audience percieves it, I would like them to enjoy the shapes and the anthropomorphic structures as much as I do.

Championing Insignificance

Glorifying Glitch

Walking around Nottingham after a storm I saw debris scattered around in broken and twisted forms that sparked my imagination; What had led to them being here? The wind? The rain? An accident? Or something more sinister? But they were left and ignored, without a voice. I want to do something with these pieces to give them a voice, to allow them to tell their story. But how to go about this?

Collected and laid out in the studio I ponder how to interpret the voice of the insignificant objects. Under close observation the pieces have scratches; wounds of their previous incarnation. But these marks are slight and difficult to see unless properly presented, therefore I have come up with a method of preparing the pieces. If I wash and coat the objects with white paint I remove all distractions such as colour and mass, then I can use black pen to highlight the scratches on the surface. This forms a language upon the surface that details the events in the life of each object.

 

The linescape keeps growing and evolving with the object, handling them creates new marks to draw around and so it is very difficult to know when to stop drawing. The marks are endless but my patience is not, I tend to work on several different pieces and come back to these trace/drawings so I do not lose motivation. They are done when I feel they are right but their story carries on. I find myself pondering black and white; the pen and the page. How clinical and cleansing the lines have become now that I am telling the story of the forgotten object.

The contrast of the mirrored surface works well on this fragment as does dense collections of lines as shown on the bottom image. I am still not sure how to display these pieces, they have become too clinical and decorative for my taste, the excitement for me was in the discovery of the initial object, the thought of 'what could this be'? The white makes the pieces look alien, as though paper has taken a 3D form and therefore maintains this question but the lines have become too binding, limiting what the object could be and how it can be displayed.

 

I have been researching into Callum Innes’ work where he layers on paint and then removes it with thinners this made me wonder, what would happen if I etched away at the marks instead of adding the details on top. I therefore experimented in beeswax & oils to find out what this would look like. The wax seemed the perfect malleable surface to use and worked really well but has taken ages to dry and cannot be framed easily as details in the surface texture would be lost.

I used cheesewire to scrape larger slices off the surface and then blended them back into the paint for different textures.

 

To be continued...