In terms of this piece. After the failure of making molds as i have mentioned before, it seemed a damn shame to bin it all. More than that it is a reminder to me of a lesson learnt. Whilst plaster cant be glued and sucks as a mold to fill with anything, it is not the end of the world when something goes to pot.

This term has been about that because a lot has gone wrong. This is a piece of work which i made thinking about Cornelia Parker's shed and suspended form as another avenue for sculpture. Frankly all the other hanging stuff ive done in the past has been poor and uninformed. However i couldnt just bin a weeks worth of plaster work away, all of that broken material can become something else.

So this is what i have experimented with here. Weirdly, its a notion of recycling my work...

Unfortunately, as much as i love this piece, i did want it wall mounted originally. I would have loved to have had it support free, attached to the white wall as if pertruding and morphing from the wall itself using industrial sticky pads. I did buy these and was told they would do the trick. However they did not stick to the plaster which is a great shame. It was not the weight so much as the properties of plaster.

Instead, i opted to return to the routes of this term and present the body on a slab to be walked around, observed and looked quite literally 'in to'.

In all honesty, i do like the table, it makes the sculpture appear to me more innocent, like viewing it is fare more about exposure, not just viewing.

Cut by band saw i do see this is a circular project that has reached a conclusion, a body which now, using plaster as a new format is exposed and looked into. The plaster had marbled inside as well to add an idea of layers and slats. Slices of an individual, broken down.

Currently working on a head made from slices of Styrofoam board. the board cut into squares and stacked into a cube and then cut and sanded. The idea then is that i can see the layers, that mix of human form with something less... organic maybe?

The outcome is turning out to be much more primitive. Almost an Easter Island head figure.
My dad spoke to me about how i had come to look at the human figure in this light. We have joked for years now about a sculpture in Liverpool which looks like a head prayed to by a religious group. 'All hail the head' was the tag line we'd say driving past the thing.

The work 'Dream' by Jaume Plensa is enormous. Seriously the thing is 66 feet tall and build on the grounds of an old mine. It's a head, covered in a material called Dolomite. This makes the 500 tonne statue sparkling white. 



Interestingly enough, because of its size and weight, it had to be built in slats from the ground up.

  
Yuichi Ikehata...

Literally just found this artist whilst looking at the Body worlds Exhibition.  That was mentioned to me after the exam. Using real bodies, stripped of skin and covered in silicone and moved into some, sometimes compromising positions. TBF its not like they mind.



However this other artist, Yuichi Ikehata, its different, i dont know if its digital or not, or a combination.

Im thinking of how i can combine metal with plaster now to create sculpture. I did sketches a while back about it. Using nails to create 3D images of children, refugees, now this might be taken to a whole new level.

But first up. I gotta break the molds.

Christine Borland?
Giant heads cast in fiberglass i believe.


The things look more like they are part of a history museum, like some ancient but advanced civilization used to pray to them to make the sun rise. She came about about a week into this term when the idea of making such a thing from plaster was much more of a realistic thought. But hey these are lessons to be learnt right?

Again whilst im here (I have done the research on days aside today so please let it be known that i am researching and just because all of these posts will have the same day stamp, the research is not the result of me sat here googling shit ti fill in the gaps. I will be honest the making of the molds has taken a lot longer than planned to have it simply break on me... that really pissed me off, i have been keeping up to date with things.

Irony that i spend most of my time in the work shop this term...

However, Antony Gormley. He was a different tune. Again his name had co,me up in previous weeks but the relevance had only become more meaningful in light of my recent... accident.



I'm thinking about all those broken pieces of metal and perhaps a figure with plaster pieces could work too?

  I did look at wax as well to fill in the plaster molds. to see if they could be broken free into slate that would look like the patterns of neural networks in the brain.

 It was interesting an aesthetic. Damn stuff fused to the plaster though even with Vaseline attached to it.

  maybe it was a frailty thing? it could only be scrapped up.
Ollie had a good theory on it that because the wax was such a high percentage of liquid ,especially as i was poured in a melted state, the plaster absorbed a lot of that liquid, essentially gluing the two materials together.

Cornelia Parker also appeared in my notes during last week so i better fill you in here so that i don't forget to put her in. Come to think of it, I began looking at her work for the reason of form being translated into something else. Initially this was to be the look into why i was slicing and dicing the human form. Now However, we have something else. My redundant molds are as her work was. Objects that once were, made for purpose, broken down and made anew.




its beautiful work.



And i can see her angle on it. Perhaps then it is something i should investigate further. More than that, can these broken pieces go on to make something else... something human and also, not human at all?

People i spoke to talked of Mark Quinn A LOT. He is just one of those figures in sculpture and his work is extraordinary. I just don't know right at this moment, how relevant it is.

 Naum Gabo. Is an interesting idea, his flat plains to create 3D sculpture in the human form creates something that is organic yet some how detached from living tissue. the shapes are reminiscent... for me, of cityscapes and technology. A Deus Ex concoction  which i like.

However i have some bad news. The plaster molds have broken. This SUCKS because i spent hours on the stuff and now it is essentially useless as it is. I may have to break it up and find another use for it. Its a great shame because i loved the concept behind it. Frankly the experiment worked far better in Styrofoam than it did in plaster.

 The idea was to fill this with plaster, produce a mold, remove the Styrofoam slats and then fill the holes with new materials. But it didn't work out that way.

 

This is something i had hoped to recreate using Plaster. Its a first, I've never used the material before and because of that i poured the plaster to thin and with too much water. it was like chalk.


But lesson learnt i suppose, try try again and all that.

Once mounted the layers can be seen and the original shape has been warped.
     

However i am very pleased with the out come. It is different and shifting and works within the space. It is very contained. frail but striking to see from every angle. Next i like the idea of taking the human form through the same process. If i can get the Laser printer to cut the MRI stills into the same slices. It will be rigid and angular but will also be very interesting. We shall see how it goes.

  As it turns out the world of art to do with MRI scans is so small that my own blog has shown us as a result... however, i have done a thing.

i bought myself a Styrofoam ball to play with as an early stage of experimentation. the idea is that it can be sliced up easily to give a small idea about how things like a human head might look if it was turned and separated into stackable slices.

Easily however, it was not. I decided to use a band saw however to avoid the ball bouncing around or making the lines wonky, thus cutting pieces that were narrower at one end than the other, i had to build a frame that would support the ball without destroying it, that would keep the ball in place as i was cutting segments. What i came up with was this!

      The ball being supported in the bottom by a nail to stop it moving around when the first segment was being taken away and so on.

    
The band saw was a success thank god and the slices reminded me a lot of sliced fruit, probably because most fruit is round-ish and can be sliced. But it was a success to have a piece that had changed and become some how more uniform crisp having been sliced.

Having come across a set of MRI scans online (not weird i promise) and it gave me an idea. i don't know why but the idea of taking the human form and sort of making it a relief or contoured like a map is interesting to me. Its the starting point for this project so i better get to it.

For now this will be a sculpture project but we shall see how it develops. I am using K'nex (toys yes but they are like Lego and can be useful) to rapidly prototype ideas which can be photographed and then taken apart to try something new.

To get a better understanding of what i am starting to look at, lets have a look at Eugene-Louis Doyen. His work is morbid and horrifying but weirdly fascinating. I found him in a video by Vsauce wich asked why we are morbidly curious, why we cannot look away from war and gore. Car crashes and car chases. but his work looked at chopping up real bodies into well... stackable slices. Its amazingly macabre but also very interesting.
showing us what we are literally made of.

So i want to try and recreate that (Not with actualy people obviously) but with this stackable thing, it is interesting. and that is enough for now.


                                                                         

Ikon Ikon Ikon...
Oliver Beer was oh exhibition when i stopped by with no inkling as to what to expect as Ikon is always rather hit and miss. Frankly when i go there i always feel like an OAP in an O2 shop. Staring unblinking at walls covered in stuff that i am unmoved by and don't care about. This walk through was no different. Beer's work for me was well... boring and did nothing for me. whilst it might have moved others mountains, for me it did little to stretch my face muscles around.

His work included a large amount of ready-mades and vessels like his grandmothers chamber pot with microphones in them whilst the 'Tristan Chord' played to an almost ear bleeding volume. but in that room of white walls and wooden floors. it did nothing. it sat there, a large mass of wood and ceramics piled in a room, carefully, but not in any many i deemed captivating. Getting a kick out of flicking the pot and hearing a loud 'ding' before reading a signed marked 'do not touch the exhibit. For me this was a let down. Honestly this would have worked better if it had incorporated an interactive element.

his best work of the day was his reanimation of 'I Wanna Be Like You' from the Jungle Book. But where each of the 2,500 frames that go into that film had been split frame by frame, and been coloured in by 2,500 school children from around Birmingham. with the first frame starting with the youngest children to take part through to the oldest students colouring in the frames at the end. Leading to a natural growth and progression to the piece.

There was also an old cathode ray TV on the wall playing a Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech but where each word had been placed in alphabetical order... for literally no reason at all.

Personally given the genius and iconography of that speech. I looked at that as more of a vandalism of art than anything else.

Side note, i also did work on a program called Zbrush which is a 3D modelling tool used by designers to digitally sculpt. It was very tricky to get used to and i could only have a small trial because the actual program costs 700 pounds. However the trial was free and this is the mid way point of a small project i got up to during the term. I suspect this is probably more the path of art i will be taking. The kind of work that goes into the making of scenery and ultimately every aspect of a digital environment you could expect to find in a film, a TV show or game. Every aspect needs to be drawn and designed on paper and digitally and it is something i like the sound of.

The Immobile, bright, colourful and absolutely free...

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/string-art-216854

meanwhile i also fell in love with this type of installation. Using only string as the material to create curtains of colour. Now although you may think this lacks the same depth as the other elements i have explored, there was something overwhelmingly positive about this kind of art. It was beautiful.



Now i have no idea how, or how long this must have taken...

This is an installation by Anne Patterson and i loved it so decided to do some playing with string of my own.
 

whilst they are not as big as they look there is something about them and may well pursue this kind of thing in the future.

at the start of this term i was very keen at looking at the refugee crisis and whilst that never particularly left my mind, it did take a back seat. It wasn't until i was with my cousin and her child that i had a brainwave when i saw she was playing with a mobile.

There was a moment when i remembered the child refugees i had seen in articles during first term and the irony that they were refugees, people on the move or on the run, yet they were stuck, poverty stricken in the towns and cities of Europe. they weren't Mobile, they were immobile and that is what i thought about.

as a small but meaningful installation, the hanging immobile is a stark reminder of how children caught up in this humanitarian crisis were being left abandoned with no where to go whilst children from Europe are free to live the happy lives we want them to have. lives with toys, mobiles and out of danger.

  although this is not the actual mobile as this image is from google, i wanted to show a quick comparison.



these are the hanging parts of the mobile. the shapes ARE NOT random and i talk about it in my sketch book. i plotted all the towns and cities a refugee fleeing Aleppo would have to go through if they were to walk from Aleppo to Dover. its a heck of a trek, and a dangerous one through desert, woodland and towns alien to them. if you were to draw a line of this trail, it would look like the shape above. The mobile is made from the shapes of the terrible journey child refugees must make.

 A large experiment on canvas of London. whilst i did make sketches at the time this one is done from photo just because of size. The canvas was large and i wanted to try and give a static shot some life and energy using a different palette. I think it went pretty well.

I did attempt other methods of capturing energy in still life by means other than just drawing them, these were taken in Lancaster's back streets and on the Lune estate, they were then turned grey scale for maximum impact. they do have a certain energy to them.

Myles Linley became a rapid source of inspiration, his work just packed so much energy using minimal colour, but with harsh lines and destructive use of materials such as charcoal his work really stood out. He is one of the reasons i made use of charcoal for my on the go sketches.

  Examples of linley's work

i did sketches on sight as well which can be found in my sketch book. However not all of them are of the Lune Estate.

The album 'the Last Ship' is all about a ship building neighborhood, a community. Now i have family in Liverpool and so during galleries week i went out to Liverpool with hopes to get some shots of the dry docks there which, according to Google earth were easily accessed and open for you to take lots of photos.

However this was not the case. Upon arrival at the dry docks i found that the docks now belong to BAE systems and all had massive roofs to them. more than that, as it happened during that week, a royal navy destroyer was having a bit of a refit, or something, the guy at the gate didn't say and i didn't ask. I did ask if i was allowed to take pictures or even speed sketch the cranes and dry docks, of course i said i had no interest in the ships. This wasn't good enough i'm afraid and i was not given permission to take photos or draw on sight. So no pictures for my project. Sad times.

But no one likes a quiter and on my way back to Lancaster i took a different route home and came across a bridge and industrial wasteland that was in serious need of being photographed.

Again i drew quick sketches with charcoal and pencil which can be found in my sketch book.

a day out at the Lune Industrial estate for some photos had some fantastic results. i have been influenced by an album called the last ship by Sting. its a fantastic album and it's all about growing up in an industrial landscape. This idea appealed to me, still does. i want to capture the energy of an industrial landscape.

Firstly, i needed some good shots.