Book of thought

So I went back to the book of thoughts, which was my interpretation of the movement of the mind. I've been recording my thoughts, feelings and ideas in a little book. Facial expressions are caused by thoughts, feelings and ideas, these facial expressions are visual movement of the brain. From my book of thoughts, I photographed all my different facial expressions and made a stop motion video. I chose my favourite facial expressions and painted them in monochrome.

my studio space :)

These were the finished prints, the two images below were the otherside of the newsprint.

layers

These are photos of the small ceramic sculptures I did as testers. Still waiting for the finished piece to come out of the kiln, I'll update next week

IrrelevantPin

This is the work of Allison Lapper, the artist who modelled for Marc Quinn. Her aim was to prove there is beauty in everything. This is all completely unrelated to my project but...... :)

Beauty out of damage

Pink Hands

Was at a talk on 3D last week and Marc Quinn came up and I remembered I saw his exhibition when I went to Verona in Italy about two years ago. This guy is crazy, he just crosses the line and he's so cool. He creates sculptures from ice, blood and his own poop :) He made a sculpture of his head from his feaces and called it 'Shit Head' :) ....creative. He has always been interested in 'otherness', in showing bodies different from the human form.

 Allison Lapper is a british artist who was born with no arms and shortened legs. Marc Quinn was interested in disabilities but not in a pitying way. He said that old sculpture where limbs have already fallen off, like the Venus de Milo, through wear and tear of time have come to receive and unconditional acceptance of their beauty. He wanted to make equally beautiful sculptures of people who had been naturally born without limbs...what was the difference?

Another sculpture of Quinns that is exploring the 'otherness' of human bodies, is 'Kiss'. This is a sculpture of two Thalidomide victims, Mat Fraser and Catherine Long. Thalidomide was a medicine given in the 1950's to help prevent morning sickness, but it resulted in birth defects for the child. Kiss forces the viewer to face their prejudices, what is beauty? what is perfection? what do you think of illness and disability?

This is a drawing by Kathy Prendergast, her work in the 1980s was concerned with issues around territory, using mapping as a metaphor for control. In the Body Maps series she painted cross sections of the female body as if it were terrain to be tamed. In her sky drawings series, she leaves out all defining features except for roads and rivers, so that each city becomes a diagram of its historical construction. The map no longer offers itself as a narrative or interpretive tool but instead is transformed by drawing into a zone of imagination.

Kathe Prendergast's drawing 'Lakes' reminded me of photographs I'd taken of my acetates on the window facing the garden after I had played around with photoshop

My attempt at a stained glass window

These photos were slightly edited, I was experimenting with photoshop, never used it before... s'cool :3 Anyways, I put my acetate sheets up on a window in the college facing on the gardens, I'm waiting until tomorrow when the weather is better hopefully so that it will create some cool shadows. I played around with different effects to check out the different patterns I created I might paint some of these.

Inspirations

Here's a quick post to keep anyone who follows or has any interest in artists I'm taking inspiration from. Ours tutors call it SEQUENTIAL DEVELOPMENT :3 Find something good, take ideas from it and develop.

 Regarding my abstract work on the brain matter patterns, I thought of Jackson Pollocks paintings. His free wild technique of what seems like aimlessly throwing paint on to a canvas, but actually creating a pattern, by repeating these drops and splashes. With the ink and stick you can be as messy and careless as you want, but when you still create your pattern it makes such an impression.

Doodles

These are some drawings from my sketch book regarding movement and motion in and about the brain. The photos themselves are fairly crap quality.

T

A piece of frank

This is a drawing of my boyfriend I did last week one night when I wanted to do something non-project orientated. Now back to work :)

P.O.A

Sooo, my plan for the end of my project so far, well for the next two weeks of college and the Christmas holidays; while I'm still in college and have the facilities I want to display my what hopefully will be a stained glass window, get stuff done in the print workshop. I'm going to finish my ceramic piece, get it glazed this week and hopefully it didn't blow in the kiln, fingers crossed. Then I have a little tangent off the centre point of my project that I want to do a mini-project on to the side.

 My project is the movement and motion of the brain, which can be interpreted as the thoughts, notions and ideas that are constantly moving in your mind, that make your body function and move. This movement of the brain creates thoughts and these thoughts, feelings, memories and ideas cause emotions and expressions. These are physically apparent through facial expressions and gestures.
 So I'm going back to my book of thoughts, my tutors quite liked this metaphore, the brain being an open book. I have a book that I'm going to record my thoughts, feelings, ideas, lists and notions for the next few weeks and from this book, I'm also going to record these by photographs of my facial expressions that symbolise the movement inside my brain. From these photos I'm going to choose a series of images and paint them.
 I'll end up with a series of self portraits that portray the movement and motion inside my brain. The paintings themselves will represent movement and motion physically by the changing of facial expressions. Maybe with the photos I can create a stop-motion of facial expressions at the end.

Print

Gavin Worth
'And light fell on her face through heavy darkness'.

I finished off my wire drawings of the head and brain. I looked at Alexander Calder and Gavin Worth, both famous for their wire sculptures. Anyway I went ahead with my wire drawings, I got about 6 or 7 layers. I'll upload photos once I'm back in college because they are on my wall. I'm going to ask Kieran for some advice on them next week, about where to go from here. I was thinking of hanging them somewhere because they make really nice shadows.

Alexander Calder

I just played around with
the photo quality here to
 see how it looked.

 I approached Des during the week about starting a print but I wasn't sure how to go about it, so he came up to my studio today and had a look through my work.
 We took all my wire drawings of the head and brain and photocopied them downstairs, layering them up, inverting the colour and moving them around into different positions. They really gave the effect of the X-rays and the MRI's, especially the inverted colour because the wire is white and the background is black. The layering up gave a nice perception of depth in the X-ray. The further away wire drawing blurs quite nicely and the more the wire overlaps and crosses gives deeper and darker lines which gave the drawing great definition.
  I'm going to the print workshop on Monday and I'm going to do a mono print of the photocopies from today.

  When I got home to Galway today, I played around with my photocopier and acetates because I'm not sure we're allowed use acetates on the ones in college. First of all I made multiple copies of my abstract brain matter patterns. It took a whole thingy of ink to paint 6 and it was so tedious sooooo I took a shortcut :) I now have about 20 sheets, so next week I'm going to ask Mike Fox if there is a free window somewhere I can display these sheets to make a stained glass window, like the wire drawings, I think these will create some really sweet shadows.

Ceramics II

I went to another ceramics workshop this week, where I continued on with my mini brain scans. I got a large slab of clay sliced them up into separate forms. Unlike last week when I pushed the pencils and sticks through, I decided to make this a cleaner more polished version of the idea from last week. So I developed from that and just cut out individual shapes in each of the slices. I gave each piece a smooth finish and I fixed them up a bit so they looked more ornamental than last weeks prototypes. At the moment they are in the kiln so on Tuesday I'll head down and glaze them. I glazed the smaller pieces just to see how they turned out as a rough draft and they've been in the kiln since Monday so I can collect them on Tuesday as well.

A week or two ago I painted with stick and ink onto acetates in the design of the brain. Once I have finished with my wire drawings I want to create multiple sheets of the acetate pattern and place them all on a window. My tutor said it would be possible for me to put them on one of the college main window panels, I think this will look really cool once it's done, like a stained glass window. I bought 30 acetate sheets but they're the smudge resistant ones and aren't fully see through so I'll see how it goes.

Ceramics

This week I attended the ceramics workshop. I really enjoyed working with clay. My tutor Kieran had suggested awhile back that I experiment with x rays through clay, by making holes and marks through a lump of clay and then slicing it up to show the patterns of movement. I made a small prototype just to see how it would turn out. I was pretty pleased with it, its very rough and quite small, so next week I want to go back to the ceramics department and create the same idea but on a larger scale and more refined. Kieran mentioned that he would be giving a talk on glazing also. So I look forward to moving on with this ceramics idea of movement through the brain.

Unfortunately I broke my camera on Halloween so I have no photos to upload for the moment, but in a week or so I should be able to sort that out. So since I've updated last I continued on with the scans and MRI and how I felt movement and motion was conveyed through these scans. The acetate box I made was just a rough draft, the wooden frame is quite crude and the acetates are quite opaque. So moving forward with this I made substituted the acetates for wire drawings, this week I have been making wire drawings of the head and brain that when they are put together show a 3-d head, of sorts. I'm still getting used to using wire so its a little messy at the moment. Ill update photos later.

          


Back to the idea of conveying movement through the brain by layering, like X-rays and MRI's.
 I found an artist called Angela Palmer who etched markings onto sheets of glass and when they were put together as a block it formed a 3d image. She also got this idea from MRI's and X-rays.

Link to Angela Palmer's gallery:

http://www.angelaspalmer.com/nggallery/page-577/album-2/gallery-3/




I liked the idea of the movement being shown by layering and scribbles. If you follow these scribbles and markings it brings you through the path of movement in the brain/body.

  For a few days, i made observational drawings of people and objects around me, by layering up markings and lines to build up the image.


 I went to the materials room and asked one of the technicians if it was possible to get a box made out of 22cm x 30cm small spars.

 Once I had that I began my observational drawings on sheets of acetate using ink with a stick. I made about ten sheets of mark making, which when layered up together form a 3d image.

I liked this concept and now that I know how it turns out once layered together I would like to continue with it and perfect the mark makings and the drawings themselves.

 I am thinking of getting a bigger box and using A3 acetates and creating a much more detailed drawing.