Photographs

FAT Research: V&A Visit

FAT Project, Personal Projects, Photographs

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Above: photographs taken of classical marble sculptures in one of the rooms at the Victoria and Albert Museum, taken on my phone

I spent about 3 hours in this part of the museum drawing and photographing some of the sculptures shown above, partly for practice as I am wildly out of practice in terms of drawing, and also for research as part of my FAT project. I wanted to look at the body types and poses in particular, which is why I have photographed and sketched them from different angles.

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Above: photos of a variety of sketches done yesterday at the V&A, taken on my phone. Some are on A3, and some are A5.

I started off trying to realistically capture the forms and shading using pencils and pastels, but I wasn’t entirely happy with my efforts, so I then used blind contour drawings in felt tip pens to warm up a little, before shifting back to pencil, the moving on to simple line drawings using just a fine liner pen to capture the forms. I have been struggling lately to motivate myself to get out and make art, due to overworking and poor mental health, so even though I am very critical of the drawings themselves I am deeply proud of myself for getting out and travelling across London to the V&A to actually make some art.

I think given how out of practice I am the drawings aren’t a total loss, I still managed to capture the forms and that was the main point of the exercise- to practice and to study the body types and poses, which I think come across in my drawings. I particularly like the line drawings, they aren’t perfect but it was freeing to draw directly with pen and simplify the sculptures down to the bare essentials. Also with the pencil and pastel drawings I tried harder not to erase too many of my mistakes- I quite like seeing the bits I’ve re-positioned and redrawn as it shows the development of the drawing, and it was helpful to get me out of my perfectionist mindset.

I would like to go back and draw some of the sculptures in other rooms, mainly focusing on European, as I am white British and I am examining the lack of diversity in classical European sculptures in particular. I think next time I might take some other drawing materials such as watercolours or inks to try and do some more gestural studies. I would also like to try redrawing the sculptures with different body types (I will probably use images of myself in similar poses as a reference) and possibly experiment with digital drawings on Illustrator.

Work in the Final Show

Assessment, Exhibitions, Photographs, river project, UNIT 2, Videos

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(I took this photo before I swapped out the keyboard and mouse for the cleaner ones)

Overall I am surprisingly really happy with how my installation turned out- the room is a really good, well lit space, with large windows, and it looks much better since I painted it, and swept and mopped it. I am also really pleased I was able to make the table top for free from scrap wood, as that saved me a lot of money, and I think it looks much better than the Ikea table tops do anyway. I decided to keep the trestle legs I got from the BA student black, as I liked the contrast (and also I’m lazy and painting over black paint with white would have been a nightmare) and I think it helps to break up all the white in the room. I had to ask my classmates to tell me the river Thames I painted into the table top looked fine, because otherwise I never would have stopped trying to touch it up and make it “perfect”. Considering I didn’t use masking tape or anything except the pencil outline and paint I think it came out well, and is fairly recognizable for what it is, without any need for labels or a more literal representation.

In terms of curating the objects for the exhibition I feel that I have chosen the right amount, and the right selection of materials- I was not able to get the aluminum pieces to a high enough standard, so they have been omitted, the other lot of glass wax pieces I made came out much less transparent and much milkier looking (due to the touch of blue wax I added to offset the yellowing that had happened from the glass wax being overheated) so I left those out and put in the first lot I made, which are much clearer and more transparent. I also left out the herculite casts as they were not up to standard, and are also still fairly fragile compared to the other materials, and I left out the iPad 3D prints, as the Einscan ones were of much higher quality.

In terms of the digital work on screen I am very happy with how it looks- I have chosen one of the larger bones that has a particularly interesting form for the audience to play with, and I feel that Meshmixer was a good choice of programme for the audience to use, as it is fairly simple programme to mess around on- hopefully people will use it and enjoy playing around! I made a 2 minute video, which is on one of my earlier posts, which shows how to move around the 3D model, how to zoom in and out, and some of the basic tools they can use on Meshmixer, in case anyone gets stuck, and this is on the Mac desktop, titled “How to Use”.

I have discussed this previously, but I chose the five bones that I did as the jaw bone pieces proved difficult to cast in some of the methods, so much so that I could not get a good cast of them in the herculite, or glass wax, so I decided not to include them at all. Also they are a bit less ambiguous than the other bones, so I felt it best to leave them out, as I like the ambiguity of the shapes of the other bones. Also I left out the brick, despite having cast it in herculite, glass wax, bronze, and aluminum, as I felt it looks odd to have 5 bones and then the brick by itself. This is a shame, as the casts of it are quite beautiful, but it would have stood out too much, so it was necessary.

when I think back I thought I would have recreated the rope, brick, plastic bottle, and driftwood in different materials like I did originally with the vacuum forming, for the final show. Unfortunately the rope and bottle became unusable after the vacuum forming, and the driftwood turned out to be quite complex to cast, so I never ended up doing it. The bones became my focal point quite by accident, as I found myself drawn to the shapes and textures of them when I first started experimenting with the macro lens back in the first term. I don’t regret this, because I feel like I have made a strong body of work, that I am very proud of.

 

 

 

Weekly blog 03/06/19 – 07/06/19

Photographs, river project, UNIT 2, Videos, Weekly Summaries, Work in Progress

Monday 03/06/19

  • Took moulds from foundry down to Ceramics studio and started testing them out
  • The clay is much softer than anticipated- I am used to more solid materials such as the wax, so de-moulding has proven more difficult- the clay loses shape as soon as you try to pull it out of the moulds
  • I found leaving the clay in the moulds to dry a little helped, but not much
  • I only managed to get one clay bone finished; I had to do a lot more work to it than I was used to doing with the wax to get it to look right, using the real bone for reference

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  • I also popped into the 3D workshop to chat about the new scanner with the technician, Jonathan, and ended up doing a scan of one of my bones then and there

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Tuesday 04/06/19

  • I booked out the photography studio last week for this morning, to photograph all my sculptures so far, with the help of Richard, the technician
  • Ended up coming back after lunch and staying there til 3.30ish, as some pieces proved trickier to photograph

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  • I took 360 pics of all the pieces except for the two brick casts and the bronze casts, and I plan to animate them into little gifs for my website
  • I learnt a lot about how to light different shapes and materials, which I hope I can try to mimic at home with a flexible desk lamp, fabric, and a white table or sheet- Richard definitely taught me that you don’t always need the fancy equipment available at uni
  • Didn’t get time to go to ceramics again, as planned, so I went to the 3D workshop to do more 3D scans instead
  • I ended up with a few fixable scans, and one mutant scan- I scanned it twice at two different angles, but the software stitched it together wrong, giving me a mutant bone

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Wednesday 05/06/19

  • Made progress on remaking my Symposium video (I lost the entire thing because the programme I was using crashed)
  • Had to go to work in the evening

Thursday 06/06/19

  • Morning group tutorial- we discussed show details and I am happy with the space I have been allocated
  • Edited one of the iPad bone scans and sent it to print
  • Made some more progress on remaking the symposium video

Friday 07/06/19

  • Visited Jonathan in 3D and scanned the bones that went wrong on Tuesday- he showed me how to do multiple scans and match them up to get a better 3D model
  • I have one bone left to scan- I just need to do that and clean up the scans on MeshMixer and they will be ready to 3D print

BPD & Me Zine

Exhibitions, Personal Projects, Photographs, UNIT 2

As part of an exhibition I organised for my society, The Mentally Chill Society, I decided to make a short zine exploring my experiences with Borderline Personality Disorder, which I was diagnosed with around two years ago.
I started by writing down the NHS definition, the causes, and the four main criteria for diagnosis, and began thinking about how they affected me, personally. I then made some notes, shown below, of objects/imagery I might want to use. It was at this point I decided I wanted to create the initial imagery for the zine on the photocopier, as I wanted it to look and feel handmade and erratic.
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I spent about a day in the learning zone, playing around with the various objects I collected from my room on the photocopier, including- fast food packaging, smoking apparatus, my old Barbie doll, condoms, anti depressant packaging, coloured paper, patterned paper bags, doll parts, and photos of myself. These were all things I felt represented different aspects of both myself and more specifically my personality disorder. Once I had the imagery I then used various pens and crayons to create the text and some other parts (such as the mood wheel) which I then added. The original double page spreads were A3 (so once folded it would have been A4) as I prefer to work larger then scale down my work in the next stage, for better quality. The finished zine was printed on A4 paper and folded down to A5.

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The next stage was to scan the pages so that I could edit them digitally on Indesign for printing, as shown below.

I printed a proof in black and white first to check that everything was in the right place, before moving on to printing in colour.

I then hand bound the book, using waxed thread for book binding, a bone folder, needle and awl, to make the holes.

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The photos above are of the Zine in the MENTAL exhibition that I organised, and set up, which I will post about shortly.

Low Residency 2019, Day 1, 35mm projector experiments and short film

Group Project, Photographs, Uncategorized, UNIT 2, Videos, Work in Progress

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Some images of the process, and some interesting test images.

The final video- made using my phones camera, and Gabby’s phone camera, a 35mm projector, various materials, and edited with Premier Pro. The spoken part of the video is me reading out the poem I wrote “An Ode to My Vagina”, which I printed and displayed in the Human Manifesto exhibition at CSM, ran by ArtsFems and the LGBTQ Society.

Another video, this time of various clips recorded and edited- I wanted to show more of my process and may revisit these clips at a later date and reuse them.

Despite feeling really unwell today I made it in and managed to make some work I am happy with, so I’m counting this as a win.

“An Ode to My Vagina” work at Human Manifesto, CSM

Exhibitions, Photographs, UNIT 2, Work in Progress

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Process photos from screen-printing my illustration and poem piece “An Ode to My Vagina”. So far I only have the one finished print which I put into the Human Manifesto exhibition at CSM, ran jointly by the ArtsFem and LGBTQ societies at UAL, but I intend to print a limited run of this colour scheme, and others, to sell as prints. The illustration was drawn in pencil then gone over in pen, and scanned then cleaned up on Photoshop before I took it to the printmaking studios, and the poem (originally written on my phone) was also handwritten, scanned, and edited on Photoshop before printing.

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These photos show the piece being put up in the exhibition, and a few shots of the piece surrounded by other works in the show. Overall I am very happy with the presentation of my work, and of the response I got from attendees, so I would consider this a success, even though the text is slightly off centre on the illustration (something I will correct when I print more copies in print making).

This piece is deeply personal to me- as a non binary person I have always struggled with accepting my body, and in particular my vagina. For most of my life I hated it and wished it didn’t exist, and only saw it as existing for the pleasure of my sexual partners, not myself. Over the last few years I have been trying to accept, and eventually love, my body the way it is, which is very difficult when you have a lifetime of self hatred and self loathing built into your brain, and as part of this I started masturbating. Previously it was something I viewed as disgusting and dirty, something unnatural, but at the same time I felt broken for having no experience of it, so gradually discovering my body and coming to terms with my vagina’s existence, and my own independence (free of the burden of sexually gratifying others) has been a long journey. Many non binary people, trans men, and cis women have similar struggles with their bodies, but with this piece of work I speak purely for myself, and my own body.

Glass Wax Tests 11/01/19

Photographs, river project, UNIT 2, Videos, Weekly Summaries, Work in Progress

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Some photos taken of the process of casting with glass wax- the melting glass wax, the casts full of glass wax, and photos of the failed jaw bone casts and brick cast. Casting the brick hollow with glass wax is proving troublesome- the wax is very brittle and the sides of the cast keep breaking as I try to de-mould it. I will try one more time to cast it hollow but a bit thicker and if that doesn’t work I might have to cast it solid instead. The jaw bone pieces kept failing as the glass wax is too thick and not hot enough to flow all the way through the moulds- I will try to get it hotter next time, but I have to be careful in case the wax gets too hot and the colour changes.

Video demonstrating the properties of glass wax and the casting process.
I wanted to explore the properties and materiality of glass wax, and these are the results so far.
Clip 1: the chunk of unmelted glass wax, demonstrating what it looks like before it is melted and cast- you can see how the light refracts and passes through it.
Clip 2 and 3: the glass wax as it melts, showing the viscosity and how it stretches and flows much like real glass when in molten form. It is very different to other waxes I have used in the past.
Clips 4 and 5: the first attempts at casting the jaw bones in glass wax- as you can see the wax didn’t flow completely through the moulds as it was not hot enough and cooled too fast. I will try again but with the wax much hotter so hopefully it will flow through the moulds properly.
The rest of the clips: the other bone casts in glass wax.

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These photos show the second attempt at casting the jaw bones in glass wax (still not hot enough), the glass wax casts all together, the broken hollow brick cast (the details were captured beautifully, it’s just a shame that the sides broke), and one of the glass wax casts lit by Jonathan’s phone torch- as an experiment to see how light travels through them. I think going forwards I would like to photograph the glass wax pieces with a light source beneath them like this, but using a more professional set up.

Notes on glass wax:

  • Properties- melts differently to waxes I have used in the past (i.e. the green and orange waxes used in uni, soy wax, paraffin wax, beeswax)
  • As it melts it goes quite stringy and is still very thick and viscous, can be stretched into glass-like threads that look like nylon thread
  • It sets VERY quickly and needs to be quite hot to pour well, but you have to be super careful not to overheat it as it can make the wax change colour
  • You can add oil paint as a pigment to glass wax, but I’m more interested in how it looks originally- like a translucent glass
  • I might do one or two in colour just to see what it looks like, but we’ll see
  • It is quite brittle- I tried to make a hollow brick cast and the sides shattered (like glass) as I tried to remove the cast- if I retry this I will need to make it thicker
  • It picks up detail really beautifully and I’m definitely impressed
  • I need to redo the jaw bones in glass wax as the wax wasn’t hot enough and as a result didn’t flow through the moulds properly

 

Plaster Room 26/11/18

Photographs, river project, Videos, Work in Progress

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Notes

  • Made up a batch of herculite for my hot rubber moulds- to demonstrate the process I am going to leave them exactly as they came out of the moulds
  • I made sure to wiggle the moulds as I poured to make sure the plaster got into every crevice
  • The bones came out beautifully but the brick broke as I tried to de-mould it, clearly the sides weren’t thick enough
  • I could make the brick solid instead of hollow but herculite is super heavy, and if I am trying to show the process it should be hollow to match how I made the wax cast
  • I will make a thicker hollow cast of the brick later on this week
  • I wanted to get into the metal workshop today but I felt really sick and foggy so Lindsey and I decided it was best for me not to use the power tools today. I didn’t want to waste a day, so that’s why I made the herculite casts, as a way to still be productive

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I also ended up going on a walk to the flower shop in Camberwell with Ellen, a BA Sculpture 2nd year student, and we are going to be doing some bronze casting together. We are both interested in nature, and capturing fleeting moments (and both want to make Christmas gifts for loved ones) so we bought flowers from the shop, and also collected foliage on the way back. We then dipped those in wax, and the next stage is to use a hair dryer to set the wax, and then we can build the moulds- the plants will burn out directly in the kiln so there is no need to make hot rubber moulds and waxes. The wax will help to stabilise the plants and make them a bit thicker, so that they will be more likely to come out in the pour. I know it isn’t directly related to one of my projects but this is something I’ve wanted to do for a while and I feel like I might as well give it a go whilst I have the opportunity.

Cleaning Plaster From the Casts

Photographs, river project, Videos, Work in Progress

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Once the moulds had been poured and removed from the sandpit they next stage was to cut off the plaster coating, with a saw, and then smash open each mould with a mallet. The above photo shows one of the bronze casts, mid smashing. The aim was to remove as much of the plaster as possible, which was then smashed and ground up into powder, to be reused for further mould making.

This video shows part of the clean up process- once the casts had been removed from the mould, the rest of the plaster still needed to be removed from around the casts. It has been sped up by about 250%, as the original video was 20 minutes long, and I wasn’t sure if anyone would want to watch it! As they were too big to be secured in a clamp at this point I had to secure them with pieces of brick, so that they were stable enough to use the hammer and chisel on.

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Once I had gotten rid of as much plaster as possible with the hammer and chisel I tried to cut off some of the runners and risers using an angle grinder, which shook some more of the plaster loose. Before I could cut any more of the excess metal off I had to take them down to the print making studios and blast them with the pressure hose, not pictured because I got very wet!

Health and Safety: I had the extractor fan on, and wore gloves, a visor, ear protection, a dust mask and an apron

Anthea Hamilton- The Squash at Tate Britain

Exhibition Reviews, Photographs

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Photos taken by me“

A solo performer in a squash-like costume inhabits the Duveen Galleries every day for more than six months for the Tate Britain Commission 2018. Each element of The Squash has evolved from Hamilton’s interest in a photograph she found in a book several years ago when looking at improvisational theatre and participatory art practices in the 1960s and 1970s. It showed a person dressed as what looks like a vegetable lying among vines. The original photograph dated from 1960 and depicted a scene from a dance by American choreographer Erick Hawkins. Hawkins was interested in Native American philosophies and he took the form of this costume from the Squash Kachina of the Hopi culture.
The performer selects their outfit for the day from a collection of seven elaborate costumes. Each one is inspired by the original image and by different kinds of squash or pumpkin. The length of the galleries’ terrazzo floor has been tiled in domestic-scale white tiles to create a new environment within Tate Britain’s neoclassical architecture. ”
– taken from the Tate Britain webpage

I recently visited Tate Britain to run a summer school workshop and whilst I was there I got to see one of the performances for The Squash, which I did some blind contour drawings of, below. I tried to capture the movement of the performer, as well as the shapes created by the performer and their interaction with the costume (in particular the large squash head piece), and I felt blind contour drawings would be best for this, as the lines are more fluid, and once made are permanent. I experimented with different pens- fine liners, biro, and felt tips, to vary the quality of line, and as you can see some are far more sketchy and hesitant, whereas others are bold and simplistic.

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This piece was very enjoyable to watch, as at times it felt like the performer was responding to the audience in the space, and at other times it felt like they were in their own world, inhabiting the physical space whilst not being quite present. Regarding the costume, I particularly liked how it obscured the performers gender- the ruffles and design of it removed the idea of gender from the performance, as well as any other distinguishing features, giving the performer a sense of other worldliness and detaching the viewer from any preconceived notions of gender.

I have recently become interested in performance work for myself- I have always admired performance artists, but had firmly decided for myself that it wasn’t for me, and would probably never become part of my artistic practice. However lately, as my drag project idea has developed, I have found myself considering the idea of taking my drag persona out as a performance. I think the reason I never considered performance for my own practice is largely my lack of confidence in front of large groups, and my fear of being judged or laughed at by others, but I think that challenging myself to perform as part of my art might actually help me to build my confidence. I feel like the gallery space is almost a kind of safe space for artists to try out new things and perform as a character without fear, as audiences are perhaps more open to it, than if I was to take the performance out into a more public space. This piece of work has definitely inspired me to give it a go, and I think it is something I will try in the near future!

Whilst at the Tate I also did some blind contour drawings of pieces from the permanent collection, shown below.

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