http://www.woostercollective.com/

someone that shares my interest in hair

http://ffffound.com/image/fa2e4a5c663f94ec44ba64245629c502c029fd47

Website is coming along nicely :)

For a Technophobe such as myself the prospect of setting up my own website was a daunting one and im not ashamed to admit that my first reaction was to get someone else to do it- must have been my inner damsel in distress coming to the fore front. So i talked to a Graphic Designer friend and he agreed to do it for me and at first i was more than willing to let him. However i thought that it would be a much better idea to learn it myself, i found the prospect of creating a blog daunting and i managed to do that just fine so what was to stop me making a website? Well the fact that i'm an over clicker was a bit of a problem at first- you know the way your mum can't work the DVD player and just repeatedly hits the same button over and over to no avail? well i'm just like that! We've been having indexhibit lessons every tuesday with Michel Corker but the fact that ther's 20 in the class and everyone seems to be having the same problems setting it up- i wasn't learning much- so i turned to the same Graphic Designer friend who i wanted to palm the job off on in the first place and asked him to teach me, show me what to do but not do it for me and i have to admit that my earlier fears are now non existent! I'm finding it relatively easy, dare i say fun. However i haven't compleatly changed i now have the daunting task of picking work i actually like to put on it :/

Yet more A4

The A4 Exhibition

The Exhibition Poster

This is the final A4 exhibition poster, i am very happy with it, working with Liam was very easy something  which i have not had before in a collaborative project and it got done so fast, just 3 days from brief-idea-design-making. The screen printing process has always seemed a bit of a daunting prospect before but working with someone who is so confident with the tecnique made me feel at ease and not only did we get the promotional posters done but i now feel confident with a new process.

Running around like a headless chicken

Today was a bit of a hectic one and only my second day of trying to curate, the feedback and the very fact that we had asked people to re-submit work for this exhibition did not go down well, not at all. When i left uni last night at 9pm thinking that i'd had a good first day at this curation thing, having left at least a stack of 25 handwritten feedback forms and a poster telling people to come see me, the people who had gotten the feedback did not feel the same way. I had a groups of first and second years who where not happy, so i spent my morning trying to explain why the curation team had (i don't want to use the word rejected) felt the way they did and giving them advice as how to improve their work (something i felt that the third years would have not done for me when i was a first year) However i feel that positivity is the better way of getting problems solved. So the second half of my day was spent running between our studio and the Graphics studio trying to get the exhibition poster designed. One thing i learned about Graphic designer today - no matter what u ask them to do they have there own ideas! One of my first ideas was to have the A4 posters A4 sized - apparently this is a no no! and a Graphic designers cardinal sin- so that was that idea out of the window! Then he asked could he play around with the name - to which i said "sure give it ago"
to return an hour later to find out the posters now bore the title 210 x 297 - the standard A4 size- whilst i liked it - i didnt think most people would know the size of an A4 piece of paper and know what that meant on a poster "for chrissakes its an art college they should know" was the reply i got. If im honest i didnt think that most of my own class would know that so i used my vito. I didn't want to ask to much of liam as he was doing me a favor, the only things i wanted to be on the poster was an A4 sized space and the information i had given him, the rest was trial and error until we got a series of layouts that we both liked that i then i showed them to Dan and Paula and we all picked one to go with. So tomorrows job is to get it ready for screen printing and hopefully we will get in done in one day .

A4 exhibition week

So it is finally here the week of prepertation and getting the studio ready to exhibit all of the submitted work. Todays task was a lot harder than expected the curation team which consisted of myself and fellow third year students Becky Elliot and Brad Hodgson had the delightful task of sorting thorough the work a task that was mammoth to say the least. Upon our initial inspection of the work it was apparent that not all of the work was of the standard we had expected and our day was spent separating the work we fell was 'up to scratch' and the work that wasn't, which is not a task that we took lightly. We  decided that we wanted to give everyone who's work we felt needed changing the chance to re-submit and my entire day was spent writing notes to those people on ways they could tweek or change their submissions. My goal was to encourage and help but it felt a much harder task given that all of the re-submissions were fellow students on the same course. We decided to leave each of the re-submission notes along with the work in each of the students pigeion holes with a note to come see a member of the curation team who would then have a one to one conversation with the aim that they could re-submit on wednesday. I left uni today feeling terrible this was not what i had expected

And wallah it's finished

And it only took 44 hours 41 minutes and 14 seconds i don't think i could have made that time up. Right now looking at it blue tacked onto my bedroom wall i feel the sense of accomplishment that i always feel when compleating a project especially when its 5 in the morning and i'm compleatly exhausted. I shall sleep tonight, well i'll sleep for roughly 3 hours until i have to get up again and go and hand it in. :( But at this moment in time i couldn't be any happier, It's done, i don't have to live with it anymore and it will be at least a week before i have to see it again! job done now its time for me to crawl in to bed and give my aching back and strained eyes a rest ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 

Snow not the right context

As i have been procrastinating a lot lately about what to do with my frame, my tutors advice today was to just go out and do it- i.e take photographs of it in and around leeds. However its been snowing pretty heavily the past few days in leeds, and not only did i freeze my arse off all of the photographs look pretty much the same- like really bad christmas cards (what with the snow and the gold and all....) 

I am still at a loss of how i shall display or 'exhibit' the frame but at least i know i shall have to wait for the snow to melt.

where Keeping on keeping on gets you......

surprise surprise it got me a very golden frame.

5 hours and 38 minutes later.......

So this is how i've finally decided how to do it

After a few false starts i came up with this way of keeping the drawing in proportion, by blowing the original photograph up to the size i want the drawing to be i will have a better chance of keeping to the right scale and i have decided to blue-tack it to my wall ( well most of it the bottom three lines wouldn't fit) and replace the each section of the photograph with each A4 drawing so i can keep track of what stage i am at.

Idea for the A4 exhibition

Well with my work at the moment i am playing around with exhibiting different things and the different ways of exhibiting said things, however i don't have anything that fits in with the A4 theme, i want to do something more than just display photographs of what i have been up to and i don't want to have to change anything so that it does fit. So what i have decided to do is create a new piece, using multiple pieces of A4 to create a large scale drawing, it was looking at this blog that helped me to come up with it- i have been somewhat obsessional with drawing hair and i have decided to exorcise this 'hair demon' by drawing so much of it that i cannot stand the sight of it anymore so that when i pick up a pen it wont be what comes out of it. It will be quite a long drawn out process which fits in well with what i've been working on and it will be very repetitive- i am also going to time it from start to finish to see how long it actually takes.

So today we got a new brief and its not just a brief it's an exhibition, an A4 exhibition to be precise and the brief is simple, to create work based on or around A4 as well as put on an in studio exhibition. So i have signed up for the curation and the promotion team. But first things first what am i going to exhibit??
We can pretty much interpret the brief in any way we like but it would be useful to base it around the on going 'exhibition and show' brief. From the work i have been doing so far i have nothing that will fit in to a gallery setting and i'm excited to try something a little different from what i have been doing recently but what? my first idea was to create something using piles and piles of A4 printer paper and displaying them as free standing sculptures and the second is to use A4 paper to make a large scale piece - but im not too sure exactly what yet but i shall keep you posted :) oh and i forgot to mention we have two weeks to make the piece :/

Golden frame

This is the first stages of Gold leafing my 'stolen frame' i am very aware of the connotations of frame theory and what the application of gold to a found object means. But the aspect of this that interests me the most is the time spend on changing this object. The repetition of applying the size,waiting for it to dry and layering the Gold leaf. It makes me feel very close to the object i feel an odd sense of ownership. This idea of making the frame gold was not thought out, it just kind of happened it was not an intentional or a conscious intention, i did just wake up and decided that today i shall gold leaf the frame. My main fear about carrying on with this is whether it's OK? am i allowed to simply do- without having reason. Is that the artists prerogative they can do and the audience decides what is is they project on to the object? I am currently researching outsider art and it strikes me that i have many similarities to an outsider artist, in the sense that i am repetitive in my work, often using the same motifs over and over and i create work for the simple love of creating, and that my main audience is myself i don't often create work with an audience in mind - that comes afterwards. Does the fact that i don't seek the typical institutionalized aesthetic also make me an outsider artist-all be it one from inside the institution itself????

Inspiration / stealing

://alanharrold.blogspot.com/

I am a big fan of this dude's work and have been following his blog for quite sometime, i think i first took an interest in him as i noticed he is also a fan of moleskins :) yup thats pretty ,much all it takes to get me interested a good taste in sketch books! As you can't fail to see this is where the idea for my own title image came from. Im not one of those people who think i can do anything better than anyone else and i much prefer his style of drawing and painting to my own (i think i just wished i was boy called alan! hmmm bit strange- i'm going to leave you with that thought)

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