Creative Imaginings of Youth and Ignorance - Exhibition Review

Colette Reid is a 3rd year studying BA (hons) Art and Design Interdisciplinary at Leeds College of Art. Her Interests in recycling, sculpture, adornment, fashion, plastic and ceramics inspire her current and developing practice.  

Using material experimentation as a starting point she uses discarded materials and reworks them for a new purpose closely connecting the body to create fragile and organic structures. 

For her chosen piece for the end of year exhibition she has created a sculptural dress made from super market tabs, which she recycles by ruffling and dipping in plaster. The method of her working practice is often time consuming and requires care and precision due to the fragile nature of her material, to create structures within a space that can at times be quite tedious. Her main focus of this piece is not the dress itself but the sculptural form in relation to the body. The dress is suspended from the ceiling at a height that people find easy to relate with, experimenting with lighting (which for this piece she has chosen not to use). 

She creates a corset like body to connect and represent the idea of an idealized female form, exploring ideas of presence and absence and then using fishing wire creates a dress like structure for these delicate 'tabs' to sit upon. 

The dress implies human activity and a natural, free growing quality taking over the floor and the walls, which is contradicted by this rigid like structure of the corset which could imply feminist restrictions throughout history and the society we live in but could also suggest the over polluted world we live in today. These tabs man made and manufactured once removed from the plastic bags serve no other purpose, this installations could be seen as a representation of the ever-growing need and importance of recycling as well as a women breaking the boundaries/barriers of conformity.

Colette's interests and influences have similarities to my own, such as Su Blackwell 'while you were sleeping' (2004) shown on the left. 

Both Colette and Su Blackwell's installations are quite imaginative, using subtle fragile methods to make a space both dramatic and captivating that possesses a very feminine quality. 

Colette's other inspirations are closely linked to Fashion, such as Susie Mac Murray and Stephanie Voegele. 

Another artist in this exhibition who i found very interesting was Alexandra Oddie. Her work is site specific based on which she usually finds inspiration from a particular site. Like Colette she then explores ways of incorporating discarded materials and recycling them to create a particular piece . For this exhibition she has created a wall of 169 unique plaster tiles which are structurally presented in a grid using artistic lighting. 

Her work is very intriguing so much so that instantly you want to touch the wall but cautiously stop yourself, as unsure if this is allowed. In her exhibition she will allow people to touch the tiled wall to explore the full extent of the textured surfaces and satisfy this desirable need to touch. 

Although Colette's and Alexandra's work is very different, they have similar key methods of making, both exploring organic, fragile materials and incorporating structure and recycling. Both have bee very inspiring for my own practise (which although again very different) for i am keen to explore new areas of interest, such as working site specific and responding to a material as well as a space, and break the boundaries of my own comfort levels. 

Sheffield Exhibition - Spectacular Crafts

I first saw Annie Cattrell's works at an exhibition in Sheffield and instantly liked her work. I think what captivated me most was the almost perfectness of her work, highly detailed and fragile yet subtle and without knowing much about her artist practise initially i found her pieces aesthetically beautiful but also appreciated them for the careful care and time it must have taken to create them.

Her works capture moments in time such as clouds on a particular day, the breath inside a human lung. She pushes the boundaries between the visible and the invisible giving the viewer an ethereal solid, a view of what is inside and around us.
She is fascinated to the fusion between art and science and in recent works has explored MRI scans and areas such as neuroscience and anatomy, exploring and pushing the boundaries between logic and emotions we feel from these fleeting things.

Moments in our Lives

Alice Kettle textile works incorporate stories, marking themes in our exsitance referencing mythology. She uses the line of thread to connect relationships and define emotions, revealing the sense of self within her work and making connections between the touching and the tactile quality of the textiles. Her artworks can be viewed as an expression of feelings.

Caroline Broadhead

"Art should happen in the Mind" - Marcel Duchamp-

This is the essence of Caroline Broadheads work. I find her work very interesting as the works are not so much about the dresses but about what they imply. Their translucent, ethereal-ness suggest human presence and the overlapping of the dresses adds a muddled depth which work well to represent her interpretation of the borderline between presence and absence. The dresses become almost like a delicate symbol of self and the presence it has on the space it inhabits but can also can been seen as a representation of self in the world around us.

Her works often include these fragile installations incorporating these delicate dress structures and their shadows, using light and space effectively and have a ghostly quality to them yet i personally think they have a very living/alive quality to them.

Breaking the borderline's between presence and absence, and self and the world is a particular interest of mine when it comes to expressing my own thoughts and emotions through my work. Like Caroline Broadhead i often stick to a pale/translucent pallet to try and enhance the fragile-ness of life in a very subtle yet captivating way, that becomes, because of this subtlety, strong in impact and an expression of self and identity.

Anish Kapoor : Flashback Exhibition

Anish Kapoor - Flashback

- is a series of Anish Kapoors early works and two of his most recent works made from wax.

Through-out the exhibition I found myself gazing in almost amazement as these somewhat perfect objects, mesmerised and getting lost inside them.

The interaction with the pieces, through colour and their emotive  qualities, light and reflections  i found very rewarding and satisfying as with each movement that of myself or others viewing the exhibition the objects appeared to change, this interaction and movement within a still is something that interests me within my own work.

'Conversations without words'

Using  Leeds city as a site i focused my time observing and investigating forms of communication between strangers and experimented with ideas to fulfill my own need to communicate to a space. I came to notice that through hand gestures and exchange of hand that communication does not have to be vocal. I researched body language, sign language and meaning of hand gestures to create my own typography (silent language) in which i later turned into jewellery. Each link is a small handmade hand, each slightly different to the other. Some of the links consist of hand gestures where others represent letters to communicate a hidden message. (which depending what words the purchaser desired would vary in length and size for example 'i love you'). The hands are linked together to represent this silent often unnoticed form of communication within everyday life.

Through my developing practise i often use text and typography trying out various ideas as well as questioning and exploring the boundaries between words and meanings/ the invisible and the visible, trying to communicate with the audience in a non obvious way exploring thoughts, emotions, and interaction between people such as body language, touch etc.

Typography

Paul Elliman: His work explores the mutual interests of technology and language - the human voice- often referring to forms of audio signage that mediate a relationship between both. His typography is drawn from objects and industrial debris in which no letter is repeated. 

Fleet of Folded Thought (reflecting upon my work)

Taking paper as a mundane object focusing on letter writing -  now considered 'old fashioned' 'un fashionable' due to advances in technology, to create a fleet of over 500 hand made porcelain boats in various sizes.  




I became interested in constructing flat sheets of paper into 3D forms, researching origami and using my own personal experiences came up with the idea that handwritten letters not only the contain the context of the letter but a trace of the writer. 
When reading hand written letters although a silent form of communication you can almost hear the persons voice carefully folded into each word. From this i decided not only was the paper important ( paper contact from both the sender and receiver) but the actual thought contained within it, taking discarded or found paper to make casts i created my 'Fleet' of porcelain boats to visually represent/communicate the lost thought and the un-appreciation of paper in our society today. 


In some of my photographs it looks almost like a grave yard/an abandoned wreckage. To represent discarded and lost paper i chose to use boats which were damaged and broken and exhibit them of the floor. The boat is symbolic, alone a solitary and isolated, as a fleet these fragile paper like boats become powerful and have a large impact not only on the audience but on the space in which they inhabit. 

" I use paper to cut this little red figure to demonstrate the delicate fragility of human being. Ephemeral. A humans life is shorter than a papers thickness."

                                                                       Lu-Shengzhong 

Rebecca Coles

 'Wood White"
I find Rebecca Coles work very interesting as aesthetically it is very delicate and beautiful whilst recycling a medium that otherwise would be discarded and lost. Her fascination with paper is closely linked to my own; by transforming an everyday object into a piece of work that is inviting and intriguing to the viewer, allowing them to see beyond the original  source.

Su Blackwell

Su Blackwell works in the realm of paper incorporating fairy tales and folk-lore into her work. Her works include book structures, cutting out images to create 3D dioramas and displaying inside wooden boxes. 


Like Su Blackwell i am intrigued by paper as a medium due to its easy accessibility and fragile, delicate qualities. Su Blackwell employs this delicate medium to reflect on the precariousness of the world we inhabit and the fragility of our life dreams and ambitions. 


The use of paper in my own work, whether it is by means of cutting out, layering, making paper, applying the paper to another surface or creating 3D forms, has become a recurring non intentional  theme throughout my work. My attraction to using paper within my work mainly comes from how much paper is used in our daily lives yet seems to go unappreciated and to many does not hold great important. My interests lie in the fragility of life, presence and absence, boundaries of space whist exploring a sense of self and identity, enables me to use paper in various ways in which i aim to visually communicate emotions, thoughts and unanswered questions.