Sunday, 4 July 2010







constructing the city, i lay comics underneath as the grounds using different colours for a river and a park and black and white for streets and added the boxes glueing them to look like a city. made from household cartons i didn't paint them because i wanted to use the colours, some are made using box nets and templates,

now its just finishing it


Tuesday, 29 June 2010














i want my box to have a bookshelf just like the ones from the architecture exhibition at the V&A i also think it will help with giving a better perspective on size





first i painted the inside on the lid different colours as my bookshelf after i had made in three shelve pieces to hold up the books.
because it's on a canvas i can't place in real size books so i want to make an optical illusion that makes you think its a full sized shelf. so the idea is to saw off the spines of books i no longer want and glue them on the shelf.








sawed approximately 80 books and it has taken forever but the shelf afterwards was better than i could have expected and really colourful just like i wanted. it looks like a real shelf from a distance.













Sunday, 27 June 2010

painting

today was a long day watching paint dry.

once the fundemental basix construction for the box was done now i could paint it and so i have painted it white, two coats inside and out

in my sketchbook i did some building drawings out of household cartoons, comics and cereal boxes and i want to continue these materials into my box, i also think that would intergrate the idea of childplay just like there was in the beige box building from the architecture exhibition in the V&A in one of my previous posts.

time management right now is ok but i need to get a move on with actual inside of box because that is what is of importance to the project.

Friday, 25 June 2010

the construction of the box took me two days and in the mean time i was able to establish my ideas on a better scale.

for me london was once just a city became an exhibtition hosting all these diverse installations and being in the city surrounded by hussle and bussle instead of the intimidating silence of a gallery allows the audience to see the works in a more relaxed enviroment.

but for me london had also developed even further to become art itself, a permenant city that can make or brake an artist who installs their work. i have come to see london as the artwork, a raw canvas that is tempermental and such a great force that we should appreciate more.

to be honest, that is what it is: i have come to appreciate london on such a greater scale that it seems silly to ignore its superiority and majesty.

thus i come to my point, that i want to recreate a model city that can demonstrate itself as art and not just as its primary function. of course on a smaller scale.

Tuesday, 22 June 2010

starting the box

these photos are of the outside of the white cube exhibition, looking at the idea of a building so basic and simple to have hidden treasures in it. ideas for box









i started work on the box today, i found two hardback canvases i had made years ago, which were identical in size and use them as my template for the size of the box, they have a border but its not thick enough for what will go inside the box. so i have to get constructing and build a frame which i made to just over 10cm wide to go between the canvas sheets and create a rectangular box.

almost there

been doing some architecturl based drawing, the idea came from the spaces i looked at. i want to take it a step further to architure models, which i think is something i want to use in my final project. a miniature city.


went to the Gormley exhibition at the white cube, it was only two rooms but his darkroom piece was very inspiring and i'm think i might want to make a box as well though not quite like that.


these are phots from the other room which i apperently also wasn't allowed to take.
we weren't allowed to take photos but it was a dark room filled with a massive outline of a box, several boxes interlinking that glowed.
also went tohe V&A museum to see their latest exhibition called:
1:1 Architects build small spaces,
basically it is an architecture exhibition designed to give the viewer a more personal experience, instead of blueprints and building photos there were mini buildings in the museum that you could go into and explore. my favourite was a beige cube where yiu could go inside and climb stairs, it felt like a treehouse for adults.










there was also another piece that inspired me very much, which is a building made out of bookshelves or so it would seem. adding the books in there really give the piece colour but also a size perspective as to how small one building inside another building is.



but so far i think besides the elephant parade this has been the most useful exhibition and i want my final project to take on something like a box that can be filled like these buildings have been and in an architectural way emphasize from previous research the idea of how spaces are used.

Monday, 21 June 2010

did some elephant drawings earlier from the parade in my new bigger sketchbook. drawing them amongst city scapes helps me to visualise the surroundings and i can experiment with the spaces. of course these are just sketches i really need to find a centrepiece that i can focus on. and continue architectural surroundings research. look at architeture models.
need to use the elelphants or continue and progress into something bigger.

maybe i should just use the idea of art in space.

London is one great big space for art. it is one great big exhibition waiting to be explored.

The Elephant Parade in L. square

this photos shows you an idea of all the elephants lined up along the street 65 altogether.





here are some photos from leiseseter square

also i managed to go to trafalgar square and see what their latest art installation was and i must say that i thought it was better than the last one and very beautiful looking out over london it definetly beautifies a space that is already quite popular for people.



Elephant Parade and Southbank

off to london to follow the elphant parade, which should be in Lesister square and also see the live performances from the theatres there. i reckon the way the actors use the stage might help me in my work. perhaps i should collect some materials from places, ones that relate to that place and objects that relate to these places.

but really focus on finding building spaces that are unique from each other to get a diverse range of surroundings.











i found this really cool elephant on southbank, which had eyes all over its body and then if you went and looked into one of theses eyes you'd see a miniature city inside with tiny elephants in them. this idea is exactly what i was looking for, a way to portray art using the city on smaller scale.


i also found the street painos exhibition around Bank area so i documented and tried to seee how it worked in its surroundings.


i'm trying to find outside art that has a significant impact on the city and space around it.


altogether i found 4 pianos starting at Liverpool street where i found this one at the west entrance. it seemed largely ignored


i went to southbank first, the area around london bridge documenting the spaces and outside art i found there.

by the public so it feels a bit like a hit and miss installation but it helps me to understand that not all art works in the city.

Sunday, 20 June 2010

Continuing...

What has happened...?

Well the project is being continued so I'll use what I have from before and build on it, but I think i should just regard that as just research and continue from there finding something else because I felt it was also a little undeveloped or hadn't really progressed how I wanted it to.

So kicking off from last time leaves me with the research on bugs as humans sort of in a inferior/superior with technology theme.

Working with inferior, I think about inferiority in terms of size similar to how I thought of the bugs SMALL/BIG-for example what comes to mind is People and buildings as a comparison.

or numbers ONE/MANY, like an army has a greater impact than one man

or The Size topic makes me think about SPACE and how we use it

More specifically how Artists use it. You know like BIG SPACES or PUBLIC SPACES.

Thursday, 27 May 2010

Finish

What I've done was not expected but i was working toward molding the human face with the insects, to be exact beetles

the molding idea is a tough one because I thik i want to transform it gradually in stages and i'm not sure what to do about that. I tried pen which was good but the advice was that is seemed cheap so i opted for colour mixing different medias on paper.

looking back at the worker bee idea i realised that insects play a great role in our ecosystem and without them we wouldn't survive but our ignorance has shown that many humans would still squish a bug if they saw one. and that it's usually size that counts. food for thought.

Wednesday, 26 May 2010

Bugs

in a previous post i mentioned the idea of inferiority and have decided to focuss on that. i asked friend what she thought humans look like in comaparison to technology and she said inferior probably how bugs seem inferior to us yet they maintain the ecosystem and spawn life. similarly we have spawned technolgy.

drawing faces and bugs working from the idea that we have gone from superior to inferior in terms of how technology my control us without us conscience of the idea.

Beetles-cockroaches the survival pest the one that can survive nuclear and atomic bombs and has so for millions of years having reached a perfect evolutionary stage faster than any other species.

Friday, 21 May 2010

Dryden Goodwin










I looked at this artist bacause his work focuses on profile faces in erratic sketches with rough pencil and i like the rough egdes he applies with the pencil, i like his technique.



if you can see from the pictures his style is quite similar to my previous ideas for the human tranparency sketches and so i've continued some sketches trying to use this man's work as a new influence and perspective.



the difference vetween his style and mine is that his is more errectic whereas mine is quite ordered and neat.





so i continued from the Humans are inferior to technology and am using this in my final piece

Tuesday, 18 May 2010

technology

so i made lists of how many friends i have on facebook, who i talk to and who i don't and the number was shocking. at some point i ahd an idea for a human root to symbolize the learning growth of man but that idea flopped out quicked in my sketchbook. i did some profile drawing of faces using pen in wire type doodling and like how it still looked very much like technology had a had a hand.

i was looking at how i could draw the profile face trying to intergrate it with the idea of technology so i thought about how technology sees us. how technology sees us-i'm not crazy i know that technology doesn't see us but i asked in the questionaire that if it could see us what would we look like?

and various answers were like, wires, shapes my idea was paint by papers numbers.
but a great idea was INFERIOR.
technology sees us as inferior as bugs as nothing.
so this is what i want to continue looking at.

Facebook

ok, so this questionaire i did also had many questions concerning facebook and who are your real friends. so i did a lot of doodles in my sketchbook of my facebook friends and circles. and compared it to real life and found it to have similarities but not be quite accurate because not everyone you love uses facebook.

also the disadvantages with sharing things with friends, employees, employers etc.

I made a list about the problems of faecbook and i want to continue from there.

i did this because of the idea of human transpanrency and how we are meer hollow beings ready to be filled with data and information that computers can use from us, our personal details. so instead of carbon footprints, i'm thinking of technology footprint our traceablity. this led me to facebook a step up from computers knowing eveyrthing about you, hat we let them know and what we really shouldn't.

Sunday, 16 May 2010

Technology and Us

the ideas led me onto human transparency and how we once where an empty cup waiting to be filled with knowledge yet now it seems we are vessels or information that are constantly being absorbed from us through computing etc.

Britain has the largest number of CCTV cameras in the world-I find this terrifying and partially it feels unnesserary!!!

YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CANNOT HIDE!!!

I've been looking a lot at facebook and the technology that seems to exists in our day to day lives that we sometimes take for granted.


It made me think about switching off from technology

so i looked at an advert from the New York Blackout which orange used to convey their message

"For some things to switch on, first they need to switch off"


so i was looking at the internet and what we use most-

-facebook
-myspace
-emails
-google etc.

It connects people like never before which is amazing and incomprehensible for some of us.

but our facebooks are sometimes flawed, mine is, there are people i don't talk to not even if i were to pass them by in the street and it scary to think about facebook stalking

in my questionaire, i also asked whether anybody ever reads the terms and conditions and the collective answer was no....DID YOU KNOW when you sign up to facebook they own all the content on there so they own all your photos and your details.

this is food for thought and i think i want to ellaborate on this more.

Camouflage and Advertising

the previous idea seemed to be a total fluke and that it's been done was the general feeling.

so i'm back tracking again but i'm trying to combine camouflage with advertising.

I looked on the Next Nature blog which was really interesting and had some great ideas though nothing helpful was coming across...

well got these ideas from it, consumer foot print, the evolution of the shell logo because they were showing how only the hundred years or so how the logo itself has changed to fit the trend though it has always been a shell and it has always been recognisable to me.

Subliminal stimuli was a good idea as well-how advertising is aimed specifically so we buy something that we might not buy otherwise.

Need to grow on some of these ideas and see where they go.

Wednesday, 12 May 2010

Idea 1



a weird form of camouflage but i was looking back at my other research on the worker bees and remembered the idea of hundreds of drones walking towards you all bleary eyed, when they blink they don't remeber you and we don't remember them just a one moving mass but none as accounted as individuals.

people forget you
our minds blends in things

we are on autpilot

this is a strange illusion

We look but we don't see.....

so i did some sketches with graphic blending using a generic face and an imagery skyline




but they turned out really bad.




i've also been looking at methods and processes of drawing where the drawing can gradually phase in to the background. I did these in pen because it reminded me of wires and technology.




the technique was to use a line and continuesly use the same line overlapping it as squares to give it that wired look.
i showed this to my teacher and she said it seemed very undeveloped so i might just abandon that idea and move on.

Tuesday, 11 May 2010

Camouflage

Not my favourite research I've done, i drew numerous animal hides and skins looking at patterns and how recognisable they are but it seemed childish so i moved on. backtracking.

I want to try another angel of camouflage like optical illusions.....there is a type of camouflage called Razzle dazzle, which was used in the first world war and the second world war to confuse the enemy.

the idea is that the ship would be painted lots of different tone shades with funny shapes so that the enemy could not determine what kind of ship it was with what kind of weapons. the HMS Belfast is an example of Razzle Dazzle. must go onto Southbank and see that.

Friday, 7 May 2010

How labels can define us

still researching ideas on what it is that seems to make a human tick in this day and age-food labels, clothes brands, how we use our cards, even the footprint we leave on the internet paint an image of the person we are to an extent.

Even how we reward ourselves and what we hold out on.

I was digging a bit more into how labels may camouflage us and the impression we give off even before we've enetered a room.

the camouflage led to looking into matural and military camouflage which seemed to be a dead end for me.

but it helped to see different uses of camouflage.

Thursday, 6 May 2010

Food Statistics

statistics.gov.uk

it turns out that the second most bought type of foods is Breads & Cereals which worries knowing how much sugar goes into those cereals. there is a cupboard in my dining room enterirly devoted to cereals and ironically only my brother eats them and he finishes them so fast it's unbelievable and this is what worries me.

Brands like Kelloggs and Weetabix with beautiful and colourful packaging, i tried to think of the real food monster behind this and started using the packaging as scaling, thinking of how brands might label us makes me think of how they dress us up like camouflage.


there were strange ideas like the consumer monster but i'm not sure if i like this idea. i will look into it a liitle more to get a feel for where i'm going. that idea came from the cereal box experiment, i also tried it in newspaper. i'm not sure if i want to continue this idea because it seems a bit dry for me.

Tuesday, 4 May 2010

Consumersim-How brands define us through shopping trends

I did a questionaire on a bunch of random people asking them what do they put in their trolleys on a weekly basis,

and it turns out that everyone of them puts the ame items in their basket each week and it doesn't change. this made me think about people's habits that they don't like to break but also about advertising and packaging and what sells and what doesn't sell.

consumerism also made me think about a process that we seem to be trap in of buying, consuming, throwing away and then all over again.

also the supermarkets we go to are no longer independent shops, they are large franchises part of an even bigger label that honours the capiatlist way.

what i need to do is look at statistics and what we really do spend most of our food money on. I'm not sure where i'm going on this one so i might continue for a bit and see if it works, if not i'll go backwards.


i also started using consumer products in my sketchbook as materials to see if i can come up with something, see the cereal materials are cut like scales as if it were the hide of an animal.
maybe look into hides and furs.

Sunday, 2 May 2010

Technology increasing the workaholic status

in the last post you could see that i used the science question more so i keep jumping back between the two.

technology seems to have made us lazy-is a general view for some people. yet for the worker bee lifestyles it seems to have enhanced it. Now e-mails can be sent, messages, documents sent miles away through a computer, video conferencing is my favourite-you can have a multiple discussion on your telephone or blackberry with nobody in the room.

Are we dependent on technology?

I've found that this is the direction I want to take, into looking at our dependy on technology.

I truly find it inspiring that people with disablities for examples can be aided like never before with technology E.G. Stephan Hawking, and it's incredible but to be frank most of us are lucky and we don't seem to know that a lot. I want to look deeper into what we don't really need and what are our wants and nescesities.

what i should look at is the next nature blog, a blog about freaky technology advances.

Monday, 26 April 2010

Worker Bees and workaholics


I watched "Bee Movie" released in 2007 to get an idea of the worker bee-it helped a lot because the bees are all dressed in clothes and the flight bees (the ones that get the honey) are all clothed as warriors for battle whereas the rest of the hive is a massive honey factory where they store it. the only job the bees will ever have has to centre on the collecting honey process until they die. -sometimes for me it feels like that's all the economy seems to do, work work work until they drop.
The plot is based around this one bee who doesn't want to be a worker bee and decides to leave the hive. it kind of works into my idea of there being too much uniformism, labels...
I want to use this in my sketchbook looking at what it means to have a full time job and what we spend the money on that we earn.