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.