iPhone as my Pocket gallery...

So as you know i am currently working on a website, using it as another way to exhibit my work, and for a girl with basically basic computer skills i am quite proud of what i have just achieved.
This current brief of Exhibition and Show, is to get us to think about how our work is displayed and just different ways that the public can access your work, so far i have a blog and website- but now, Now i have a  way of downloading images off my website on to your iPhone to use as screen savers and wallpapers! impressed? well i am! :)
I think this is a great way for people to access my work ( if they so wish) and its a whole new way of exhibiting my work that really appeals to me. The first image is my work as a screen saver and the subsequent two are screen shots of it on my phone- to prove it does in fact work

my plan is to update my website every time i have a new piece of work and as well as having it on my website i will also make it into a downloadable wallpaper. This way i am creating a new way for my work to be exhibited and keep it ever changing as a way to make my website interactive. I am also going to look into different ways of using technology in this way as kind of a portable gallery.

Exhibition is closed

For me the work i have produced in relation to this brief is somewhat secondary when compared by how far i have come in terms of where i am as a practitioner, how i feel about my work in general and a new found confidence not only in myself but in my work, which was sorely needed. If back in September i had known that work i would produce would come second to my new found Web and computer skills i would have laughed at you.

The aspects of this brief that stand out to me are mainly based around the A4 exhibition, I think i had more up's and downs in that one week than i have had in my previous two years and four months at this college. The stand out parts for me are not the actual exhibition itself but the week before, the preparation the problem solving and yes even the running around like a headless chicken. Talking to people about their work and coming up with ideas of how to exhibit it and seeing it all in place was exciting for me. Don't get me wrong i don't see that week through rose tinted glasses it was a hard, long week where feelings were hurt and friendships became a little strained, but it was worth it for that feeling once it had opened that it was done. Curation was something i have expressed an interest in previously as a possible career path after my degree and The A4 exhibition has only re-enforced my interest in that.

My aims throughout this project changed in a way they haven't done in previous briefs, i started out wanting to explore my practice and fit in all the different aspects of that by putting on 5 very different exhibitions of street art, however once i started researching and developing ideas my work started to take on different aspects on the theme of exhibition and show which resulted in me not only exploring different ways of making work but different ways of exhibiting them.

 One thing that i didn't count on was hitting a block, making work when i had no idea of where i was going with them, what my aims where, how they not only linked in with my practice but how they linked with each other, not even knowing how or in what context i was going to exhibit them. This not only scared me but intrested me, i realised through this patterns in my ideas that where quite unconcious at the time i was making. That even when i am doing for the sake of having work that my ideas have threads and links that i don't intentionally give them.

The task of creating a website and blog was a daunting one for me as i am not a natural when it comes to keeping a diary, preferring to do first and question later. Two major hurdles for me were my basic computer skills and the fact that i have this need to have control and if left to my own devices would rather not have had my work or personal thoughts on the internet. What i did not expect to happen was that i would enjoy it. The website turned out to be a little tricker, this was to be the platform on which my work would have to stand on its own, without the process's explained or the self-depricating humor. Setting up the website could have been a much easier and shorter process than it turned out to be, the weekly sessions with Michel corker did not go smoothly due to numerous reasons, Mainly due to the fact that the address that i had bought would not work with indexibit a fact that we did not figure out until 4 weeks in and the fact that the mac suite would not allow more than 10 students at a time to access the programme we where to create it on. Due to the fact that i don't seem to learn well in group situation of this type no matter how many notes i take i decided to do the following things, purchase a different address with a different company, buy my own webspace, which i feel will be benificial to me as i can continue to use it once this course has ended, and to teach myself. Which whilst being frustrating at times i learnt how to create a website and once i had done that i surprised myself by wanting to explore different ways i could use this space as a platform for exhibiting my work. The fact that i was able to create a downloadable wallpaper and screen saver from my website was a proud moment.

From this brief i have recognised the direction my practice is taking, developed new skills,which i feel is always important to an interdiciplinary practicioner, had the opportunity to be on the curation team of an exhibition and most importantly for me i have a new found confidence in talking about my work. Each of these i shall take with me on to my next and final project.

Of all the places in all of leeds how do they always happen to catch me

So its midnight, and armed with my bucket of wheat paste, wallpaper brush and about 38 sheets of A4 paper i set out to exhibit my A4 exhibition piece in a different, slightly less legal way. Well me and my trusty helper who will for this post simply be named as 'him' for legal reasons. I find a wall that i like, its reasonably well lit, its deserted, it's perfect. Before we start we go over the simple but effective plan;
me: what happens if we get caught?
Him: we run
me: if i shout run we run, seperate directions deal
Him: i don't trust you to be able to run that fast
me: shut up - we run! deal?
Him: deal
I had the papers in order to make this go as smooth as possible, He starts slapping the wheat paste on to the wall as i start slapping the paper on top of it, we get the first line up in less than 20 seconds this could be it - this will be awesome if it works, on to the second line, a boy walks down the street and i wanted to stop right away- im a jittery kind of person, then a car pulls up on the road along side us close enough for me to want to go - leave this as yet another failed attempt- but he says no- the person in the car isn't actually doing anything, it's diesel engine roars in my ears, we carry on for one more sheet now with a total of 8 up and the car moves on slightly ahead of us and then stops- the engine stops the person is watching us i just know. It's time to go so i pick up my bag, shove the papers inside and tell him to RUN and i go left expecting him to be behind me, i almost get to the corner when my phone falls out of my pocket, the thought crosses my mind to leave it, but i stop and turn to pick it up and realise he isn't behind me! hes still there and a very tall, very angry asian man is walking over to him. what do i do? i can't go back, i can't leave him, so i walk around the corner and try to act as normal as possible. i crouch at the corner, feel stupid, get back up and start walking swiftly away, i start to feel terrible, guilty why hasn't he ran away? i stop and just stand in the middle of the street like the idiotic girl i feel- why don't i ever pick the easy projects? just as i am running out of options i run into to someone i know, its a friend of His, i try and tell him what's happening but  i sound overly excited, giddy he asks me if i've been drinking, i finally relay the information that He is around the corner i say He's in trouble and its my fault. the friend goes to find Him and i go the opposite way, ill stick to the plan and we will me up at my house like arranged, i txt Him let him know where im heading. As i turn the next corner the man in the car is in front of me getting out of his car, i duck and go back the way i came "fuck it" i think what could possibly happen i feel braver now i'll go find Him we'll go home  everything will be fine. I get back to where we where pasting and find my paper crumpled and stuck to the floor- bugger! no sign of him and if i go across the road the man will no doubt spot me! i see His friend again a little along the road and run to him, he's on the phone to Him, we wait and a minute later we spot him running back towards us- towards the scene of the crime- we defineatly would not make master crimminals! my First reaction was why the hell didn't you run when i told you to? and then i notice He isn't wearing the hat He had on, and He is seriously out of breath. We go to His friends house who luckily lives on the same road. And ther sat in a disgusting hovel of a student kitchen i find out that he thought at first that the man was just curious about what we where doing and saw no need to run,  but i transpired that the man who turned up was the brother of the man who owned the building that was attached to the wall we were pasting onto! just my bloody luck that would only ever happen to me! So when the man started shouting He tried to explain it was just a project that it was only paper and that it would wash off in the rain- the man did not like this and had apparently been filming us (so that explains why he stayed in the car and when i thought he was watching us he was actually filming us) the man tells Him he has his photo, that he demands to know where He lives- thankfully He doesn't tell him, but then the man got angry and aggresive, all of His attempts to calm the man down failed and the man was about to hit Him, backed Him against the wall and pulls His hat off. The man then started pullling down what little of the piece we had managed to get up, getting angrier still as the pages with their thick paste start to stick to him, a taxi pulls up and then another one they seem to know the man, HE takes this as his key to run- finally and he does, runs as far away as he can get without going to base in case he is being followed. After a ten minute wait in the friends house we make are way home slowly a taxi pulls up beside us and we run, not knowing if its anything to do with the man but not wanting to find out either. I get to my front door with a stitch in my side and all i can think is "how the hell to graffiti artists get away with it when i cant even manage not to be caught in under two minutes" and then i realise that my only evidence that this even happend is this story as yet again i was caught too quick to get my camera out and to be fair this was not the situation in which to start taking photographs

A dodegy title...

This is the original title image for this blog (if it differs from the one you can see at the top of blog right now my plan has worked- if not then i have failed in my attempts to figure out how this photoshop malarky works and you can ignore the rest of this post) It is just a scan from my sketch book however the drawing was not originally meant for this purpose as you can probably guess from the differing hues of the left and right pages. The image in drawn in an A4 moleskine Sketch book which is why the bottom of the scan has been chopped off- it didn't exactly fit into the A3 scanner- now i could have simply re-drawn the image in a smaller sketch book in which the pages where the same colour- however it did take rather a lot of time to draw all those squiggily patters so instead of taking the rather safer option of a re-draw- i decided to take the much more scary option (for me at least) of fixing it in Photoshop. Now normally i am against editing photographs and cleaning stuff up in photoshop- its just not for me - but every time i look at this title image i cringe at how awful it looks- so photoshop it is.
My first step is to re-scan the drawing and then scan a smaller double page of a sketchbook, then layer the images, somehow cut the image out, re-size in to fit on the smaller sketchbook pages, clean it up and hopefully it will work.....hmmm i dont have much faith in me either but i shan't give up until it is done and hopefully i shall even be able to remember some of the technical name for stuff :)

Only by the night

My so called Website.....

http://jaclynechristensen.com/

inspiration for a possible FMP perhaps

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/10616/luise-valdes-cardboard-house.html
artist luise valdes collected a lot of unwanted cardboard boxes for his latest installation ‘casa de karton’ 
or cardboard house. the project is a life-size recreation of valdes’ apartment using cardboard tape and 
lots of white paint. all the objects in the apartment are made from old boxes that have been cut-out and 
assembled into the form with a sketch-like outline for smaller details. all the boxes are whitewashed to
give the space a surreal quality of a drawing that has come to life.  


This piece by Luise Valdes reminds me of a project i did last year called The white room, where i created a room made from card and paper and it painted white. I painted the furniture in the room white and added details with black marker pens to create a 3D colouring book, and invited people to come and colour it in. 
I find this piece fascinating and have been playing around with a similar idea as a possible FMP instillation