Year Book

2002 is the year that I was assigned to explore as part of our creative sketchbooks unit. I used use the text, images and numbers from my mother’s diary of that year to create my own scroll. To challenge the idea of what a book is I used fabric with stitching and presented it in a form reminiscent of an early hand written scroll.

To incorporate the personal element of my mother’s diary I replicated her handwriting, doodles, arrows and appointment numbers in hand stitch, and to attach the photocopied images I used a thin film of sticky plastic to keep them secure and retain their durability. As my mum likes things to look aesthetically pleasing, the arrangement of the fragmented diary upon the scarf, choice of colour and images was very important.

           

Tilleke Schwarz is the main textile artist that inspired my yearbook scroll. She creates textile artworks using hand embroidery which she describes as visual poetry. Each piece is like a spill of thoughts stitched on to the linen. All of the stitched doodles, images, marks and text tell a story, but us as the viewer have to piece together the different elements to form our own conclusions and narrative tales. Hand stitching is a very time consuming process and if I had all the time in the world I would have gone on endlessly stitching my mums marks in to the scroll.

Print Making

Around the beginning of the 20th century, relief prints pulled from carved pieces of linoleum, or linocuts, started to become popular and received attention from major artists and critics, which started the growing reputation of the medium as an expression of fine art. Linocuts share much in common with woodcuts, but whereas the later type of print requires that the artist work with and around the grain of the wood, the uniform nature of the linoleum allows it to be cut in whatever way the artist chooses, allowing for greater creative variations as can been seen in the fine work of Chuck Close.

Chuck Close 'Alex/Reduction print' (1993)

Process of the prints

HOW TO: Reduction Linocuts

1.     Draw the lines of the image onto the linoleum block (remembering that the image will be reversed when you print it) and plan out the tones for the image very carefully. It's important when doing reduction linocuts to know where each color will go and what order they should be printed in, because if you make a mistake, as there's no going back.

2.     Carve the block to remove the areas where the natural colour of the paper will show through, although in some cases that will not occur at all and no carving will be necessary.

3.     Ink the block with the lightest tone in the image - it is VERY important to work from light to dark in this process - and pull prints with that tone for the entire edition. For example: if you are planning to do 40 prints you must ink the block and print it at this stage 40 times.

4.     Begin carving away at the linoleum block, removing the areas where the tones that you just printed will be visible.

5.     Ink the block with the next lightest tone and pull prints with that second tone for the entire edition. Since block printing ink is quite opaque, the second, darker tone will completely cover the first tone, except for the areas you just carved out. You will now have an edition of prints that has two tone, plus possibly the color of the paper as well.

6.     Continue repeating the process, carving away the parts of the image that you want to remain visible and printing the rest with the next darker color. Eventually you will get to the darkest part of the image (black or some other very dark hue) and very little printable area will remain on the block.

7.     Print the last layer through the entire edition and you are finished!

Pablo Picasso 'Black and white'

Reduction block printing was a favourite of Picasso's and the introduction of the method is even attributed to Pablo Picasso.  He referred to reduction prints as “suicide prints” because the matrix is destroyed, little by little, as the print progresses.  

My own reduction print of my dad...

Post-modern Fashion

Linking to the theme of Post-Modernism we were asked to produce a post-modern garment as well as explore and initiate different approaches to using fashion related media and techniques as well as developing existing techniques. This was a great chance to go even more in to depth with the construction side of things and come up with some really wacky designs.


There are a handful of fashion designers who are challenging what we perceive to be fashion. Vivienne Westwood, Gareth Pugh, Hussein Chalayan and Maison Martin Margiela are currently show casing post-modern and experimental fashion pieces that are all renowned for their innovative use of material and construction techniques. Their work is considered to be post-modern as opposed to Haute Couture (which means made to measure) because although in the past this kind of fashion would be considered controversial or risky, today we think nothing of it, especially when you see celebrities wearing them.

Hussein Chalayan

Gareth Pugh

For my dress I really liked the idea of geometric and something that would stick outwards, not lie flatteringly across the body- something that would stand out. I took a lot of inspiration from Cintia Ruggeri's dress Homage to Levi Strauss from the V&A exhibition, as the constructional methods and way she made a feature of the shoulder really stood out to me. I however didn't want my garment to be too harsh with lots of hard edges, I wanted rhythm. The solution to this was the oval. Colour wise, I wanted simple, like Ruggeri, but clinical, so I chose to keep it an off white.

Mock up of shoulder piece. Made up of consecutive rings inside of each other attached to a simple bodice.

 Final Piece

   

                     

     

Photography

Bricolage

The practice of mixing together existing types and styles, opens up new possibilities. Meanings can be produced in different ways; different types of stories can be told, new combinations are possible. It is this type of mixing that is often referred to as ‘bricolage’.

Bricolage is best known as the French word which incorporates several terms for making things through improvisation;’ tinkering’, ‘repair’ or ‘making do and getting by’. The English equivalent is ‘do-it-yourself (DIY) and like B&Q, ‘Bricolage’ is seen on large shed retail outlets throughout France. A person who engages in bricolage is known as a bricoleur. In art, ‘bricolage’ is a technique where works are constructed from various materials available or on hand, and is seen as a characteristic of postmodernism. In a variety of ways it is linked to the ‘collage’, ‘assemblage’ and ‘merz’ of DaDa. Perhaps bricolage is as much about a way of making things, as it is a general attitude.


In the Post-modernism exhibition at the V&A there were examples of bricolage pieces by Kurt Schwitters, Richard Shaw and Gary  Knox-Bennett.

'Unbelievably Modern Lamp' Knox-Bennett

Gary Shaw

'Unbelievably Modern Lamp' shows the 'ad hoc' method of composition that Knox-Bennett used in many of his pieces. The playful title, bold primary colour palette and prominent use of found objects represents the shift of Knox's work from west coast pop and funk design to Post-modern style.

In our photography elective we created our own bricolage objects like that of the post-modernists, out of found objects and then photographed and edited them in different ways...

Post - Modernism V&A

At the beginning of this project we visited the V&A's post-modern exhibition. Even though it was a vast exhibition, there was definitely something there for everyone. The collection ranges from fine art, to ceramics, architecture, video, instillations, photography, conceptual pieces and fashion. The entire exhibition was lit using neon lighting dotted throughout as the use of bold colour and geometric form to determine the layout of the space.

Post-modern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath. There are several characteristics which define the term 'post-modern' in art; these include bricolage, the use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage, simplification, appropriation, performance art, the recycling of past styles and themes in a modern-day context, as well as the break-up of the barrier between fine and high arts and low art and popular culture.

These are the notes I made during the exhibition. I tried to note down all the elements that I found inspiring and naturally I did gravitate toward the fashion and textiles pieces, however the architecture and working drawings at the beginning did capture my eye too. After learning about post-modern architecture for my A level history of art, seeing buildings by Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry contextualised in an exhibition really helped to secure that knowledge I had learnt, and with it brought interest to an area I wouldn't normally gravitate to.

Deconstruction - Reconstruction

For my first fashion project our aim was to produce a garment that has been inspired by Dada and constructed from an existing garment.
So not only were we to follow the aims of the dadists and create something which does not have to be aesthetically pleasing, but we were combining it with the concept of Duchamps 'ready mades' - taking an existing garment and changing it it in some way to create a new work of art.

Designers such as Maison Martin Margiela and Junya Watanabe, like the dadaists nowadays still challenge aesthetic principles to create garments that shock and provoke a reaction. Watanabe's eerie headpieces and dark colour pallet makes me think of the cynicism that surrounded dada and their suppression of aesthetic qualities...

Whereas Margiella's garments which have been reconstructed and reworked by hand and are made from an eclectic mix of accessories link back to Duchamps 'ready mades'.

So when it cam to creating my own garment, I randomly picked two existing garments and set about combining them, using both Margiella constructional methods and looking at Watanabe's colour palette.
I picked out a men's jacket and woman's pink top to work with and began by experimenting on a mannequin through to producing the final piece.

Dada

For the first half of term the theme that all of our areas were based upon was Dada.

Dada was a litery and artistic protest movement against the barbarism of WW1, set up by a group of artists from Zurich who wanted to break the boundaries of distinct art forms. As a loosely-affiliated group of like-minded artists, they were particularly interested in using humor and antagonism to question the definition of a work of art.

Aims:

• Reject the laws of beauty
• Ignore aesthetic
• To represent the opposite of all that art stood for - Anti-art
• Leave the interpretation to the viewer
• Express their nihilistic view of the world
• Create an art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation
•  Express  confusion
• To offend all sensibilities

Marcel Duchamp performed the most notable outrages by painting a moustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa and proudly placing a urinal as a work of art in to an exhibition.

Duchamp's 'Mona Lisa' (1919)

Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa' (1503-6)

Duchamp also created 'ready mades' which were ordinary utilitarian objects that he selected and modified to re-defining art. Below is his 'Bicycle Wheel', a sculpture made by conjoining a bicycle wheel and a stool.

Marcel Duchamp 'Bicycle Wheel' (1913)