I have been experimenting with ways to create an image, looking at identity and portraiture. Textiles has been something I have had a particular interest in for a long time. I started creating a series of portraits in the medium of stitch. Using a medium weight calico and black stitch, I created simple line drawing portraits, the subjects are not people I know and they often feature older people. The calico adds to the almost sketchy feel as it is an off white colour giving a less than pristine feel. The stitch crumples the material giving more character to the portrait. The eyes are drawn upward through the simple portrait focusing on the wild hair at the top of the piece. The informal pose has a slight sketchy feel which gives a sense of the character of the woman and the loose threads give and an unkempt appearance, she looks like she’s been outside exposed to the elements. The portrait is not whole and the chin is unfinished, the woman is not given a back story the viewer knows can draw nothing from this adding to the question of the woman’s identity.
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After the exhibitions a symposium was held, where each group was expected to prepare a presentation to show the other groups to share their experiences, intentions and resolutions involved in creating your group shows. The symposium was attended by Sophia Crilly, a curator from Manchester, who offered us an outside perspective and critique of our exhibitions. By presenting our outcomes in a SWOT diagram (see below) we could show easily our strengths, weaknesses and how we would improve if we did an exhibition again. This gave us an easy way of critiquing ourselves and gave us a strong idea of how to improve. for some of us this was our first group exhibition that we had to curate ourselves.
exhibiting and curating an exhibition has given me confidence for future shows and a better understanding of what work and doesn't work in an exhibition environment. When I look in the mirror, the woman I see Is not the girl that lives within me. The person I know is younger than that. She's trim and attractive and not all that fat. The person I see is mature and alive Ambitious, flamboyant and has lots of drive. She'd love to go dancing, be able to sing wants this not to be winter but rather her spring The lines on the face in the mirror I see are just on the glass and not part of me. The silver that shines in that lady's hair on the person I know they just aren't there. I'd give my eye teeth for the world to see the pretty woman that lives inside me Gloria Hemingway-Johnson The work I produced for the exhibition was biased on a poem by Gloria Hemingway-Johnson. Age and beauty is something that has featured strongly throughout my work. The poem was something I felt was prominent in my work and really touched me. I wanted to portray the fear of getting older but also the feeling of being younger underneath. The mask of age that becomes your outward appearance concealing the youth and beauty underneath.
I produced eight paintings all on mirrors, showing eight older faces. By producing them out of make-up and paint I wanted to convey the idea that they are beautiful in what they are made out of although their aged faces aren't our typical idea of beauty. I tried different ways of hanging the work but settled on hanging them in a line at head height. I wanted people to look into the mirrors and see themselves as the old face. I wanted them to look as if it was their everyday mirrors and they saw their everyday face. The exhibition went really well. People seemed to enjoy and appreciate the work. I got various good feedbacks from a range of people. Overall I was proud and happy by the response we received. I have been experimenting with portraiture in various forms and looking at different ways of 'drawing'. this is one of the experiments I attempted, by calving a face into a piece of fruit I wanted to document the affect of age on the portrait. I initially found it difficult to achieve the level of detail I wanted as the apple would crumble and the face would become distorted. however after to perseverance I was happy with the out come. I documented the process by taking photographs at regular intervals. I began to create the face while the fruit was fresh and ripe, the colours were bright and crisp. as time went on, like human faces, the fruit became wrinkled and lines appeared that weren't there before. the fruit was no longer appealing and it had lost its beauty, linking back to my practice as something that was once beautiful had become old and fragile. the process had blurred the face so its young sharp features had become soft and lost within the old flesh. it seems that everything has a sell by date. This is a series of work surrounding the theme of identity, looking at age and how it affect us. Ageing is a human reality we all must face, it is an inescapable reality. Each of the eyes I kept similar to portray the idea of youth beneath the older face. Each portrait stares into the camera, some serious and some joyful. At first glance the photograph reaches out to the viewer displaying the youth and vitality of the image, the colours of the older face are muted somehow and seem to sink into the background. These are images of my family and I on one half of the image shows us how were, on the other shows us to be what we once were or what we may become. This transition through life is inevitable however does the person’s identity change too? Is our identity as fluid as our appearance? Before the exhibition closed we held a critique in space with one of our tutors Gary Simmons. This was a beneficial experience as it gave us a chance to hear feedback from fellow students. They each gave valuable advice and criticism.
They suggested I made the work more universal by leaving out the features but keeping the lines and wrinkles to create the image of the viewer’s older reflection. They gave positive comments on the poem I used as it indicated the meaning of the work and encouraged a personal connection to the work. They questioned why I had hung them at that particular height, I wanted it to be at head and shoulder height to create a realistic reflection of the spectator. They also questioned the arrangement, something that I had also experimented with before I settled on the final product. after the critique I felt inspired and encouraged to keep experimenting with the idea of identity and age. We picked up the keys to the gallery at 1pm the Tuesday before we opened on the Friday. This gave us plenty of much needed time to prepare the gallery for the exhibition. We decided the gallery walls needed fully painting as we didn’t want the grime and muck on the walls to distract from the work, we wanted to create a clean professional environment to display the work. The size of the room meant this was a difficult job, we had to leave the roof for health and safety reasons but the room overall looked much smarter and gave a fresh feel to the room.
The way you display the work can be fundamental to an exhibition, we wanted to position the work so it didn’t clash or distract from each other. This was a difficult process as we had to abide by certain restraints of size and compositions. After deciding on the layout of the work we began mounting and hanging. After issues arose we found it was much harder to drill into red brick than we originally anticipated, after 5 hours we eventually managed to finish hanging the work. There are many things to think about when preparing for our exhibition; themes, the venue, advertising to the public, the physicality of hanging the work, opening nights and health and safety.
Presenting our work in this way gives us an opportunity to open our work up to an audience leaving it open to public judgement. By advertising well we can encourage members of the public to come and see the work. We all have very different practices we need to incorporate everyone's work from painting and drawing to sculpture and collage and everything in between. The name of the show was very important to us as we wanted to create a link between everyone’s work to tie the show together. The word ‘Compilation’ helped to celebrate that we were all different and that we had come together for this exhibition. for both the name and the logo we decided to focus on the space rather than the work for all the publication. the beams in the gage gallery had a strong presence in the room and seemed an obvious choice to base our advertising on rather than focus on one persons practice or work. as the location of the gallery was out of the main town we all agreed publicising the event was vital to gain any public audience. by advertising using posters, leaflets and social media we hoped to gain interest. we spread the posters throughout Sheffield, posters put up in our studios and leaflets handed out in café's, shops and bars. the opening night was important to us as we wanted it to be a night to celebrate our hard work and hopefully the success of the exhibition. We wanted to create a night of entertainment and festivity. we decided to provide food and drinks to everyone who attended. we all wanted to create a relaxed atmosphere where people could enjoy the work. by having live subtle acoustic music and soft fairy lights down the length of the room we thought this would be achievable. we managed to achieve sponsorship from a local business the Bakewell tart shop. The company helped cover the cost of printing posters and leaflets and also provided Bakewell tarts for our opening night. having sponsorship gave our exhibition a professional appearance, and by putting a poster up in their shop we also gained more advertising. Exhibiting work is an important aspect of studying towards an art degree, hanging and presenting work for the public offers us an understanding of how an exhibition is ran and gives us the opportunity to present our work to an audience for public scrutiny. This is our second exhibition of the year, working in self-selected groups we are to create a display of our individual studio work to the public. We were asked to select groups in which we would like to exhibit together, some chose groups of similar work others chose groups of friendships. Ours was one of the latter, there are eight of us all together, all with very different practices and ways of working. I personally feel this will create a new dimension to the exhibition creating a collection of very diverse work. The first step we felt in organising the exhibition was to search for an appropriate venue. This process is a long and exhausting one. Looking for the perfect venue to suit eight artistic minds is a very difficult, time has not been on our side as many of the galleries are booked up with months in advance, way before we knew to start looking. This is something we perhaps need to keep in mind for any future exhibitions. The venue we have decided on is a gallery called the gage gallery. This is a fantastic space filled with natural lighting and plenty of free room, the gallery offers 25 meters by 7 meters ready for us to fill with our individual artworks. We needed somewhere which offered us a large enough space and that gave us plenty of space to experiment to create the best exhibition we could. A life drawing is a depiction of the human form, an observation of a live model, in any of its various shapes and postures using any of the drawing media. The human figure is one of the most enduring themes in the visual arts, and the human figure can be the basis of portraiture, illustration,sculpture, medical illustration, and other fields.
workshops are a large part of learning and understanding your practice, life drawing was something I particularly wanted to get involved with as the portrait has become a fundamental part of my practice and its something I would like to improve on greatly.choosing the life drawing workshop, ran by Yuen Fong Ling, has opened my eyes to different ways of producing a drawing and also to the way I work personally. we participated in a project similar to Chinese whispers where one person would draw straight from the model and the others would line up and copy from the person in front of them. this project was fascinating to understand how people draw and each individuals way of interpreting what's in front of them .many times you couldn't understand what you were drawing until the drawing was complete. This set of workshops helped me understand and improve my way of looking and documenting the human figure. i really enjoyed experiencing with charcoal, pen and pencil in an easy environment where play way encouraged. |
AuthorHannah Watson is currently a student at Sheffield Hallam University, studying towards a BA in Creative Art Practice Archives
May 2015
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