Our Bargate Exhibition

Our exhibition at the Bargate Monument Gallery has just come to a close. All in all I think it was a success. Despite the cold building and steepest steps I've ever had to walk up we got a lot of visitors who showed positive interest in our work. The comments left in our comment book were lovely and some were particularly directed at my own work which was really nice to read. I think the experience was useful as it prepped us for our final show later on in the year. Setting the show up seemed to be a bit of free-for-all which came together in the end. This was good though as it taught us we need to be more organised for our final show. 

Here is the gallery from the far end, looking towards the entrance.

Here are the two pieces I had on show on the walls. I also had a few pieces on display in the cabinets. 

Northern Lights

Continuing on from the last paper cut using text from the book I've looked at cutting into images from the landscape. The book has a strong sense of place and I would like to use that to inspire my images. 

I tried several attempts at creating the northern lights myself, but didn't like how they turned out and much prefer the cut into the photograph. It's hard to get the colours and the vibrancy of them in paint. 

Research: Alaska in the 1920s

 Reading through the novel I am finding things I can't visualise because I've not encountered them. I thought it was necessary to spend some time looking online at the time period the story is set. I've gathered some photographs and information which will help me have a greater sense of the time and place.
I gathered some photographs which will help me picture the changing landscape; Alaska in snow and in lush summer weather. As the landscape is important to the symbolism for the story and characters then it is important for me to have a good idea of how the landscape looks, what is found there and how these change during the changing seasons; as seasonal change is integral to the story and symbolism too.

I looked at clothing and dress from the time. A lot of furs would be worn in winter. This photo is of a worker on the railroad which is being built during the story.

Homes were handbuilt and made of wood from the trees in the surrounding area. In the story a cabin is built by two of the characters.

On a homestead you would have farming land and build on that land. During the spring and summer you would farm the feilds for income and food. 

In the summer months the landscape is lush and green. The books describes a lot of different flowers and plants. There is still snow up in the mountains. 

Marshlands are also mentioned. A boy, Garrett, sees Faina for the first time her killing a swan. There is also a lot of mentions of wildlife. Hunting and trapping were also a way of living and eating.

I feel like the winter months must be the loneliest and the hardest for life on an Alaskan homestead. At the beginning of the story the landscape reflects Mabel's emptiness and grief. The joy the child brings comes out of the wilderness in winter and leaves in spring and summer. I think the months in which events happen in the book relate to the fruitfulness and then barrenness of the landscape. Mabel walks over the frozen river at the beginning of the story in a moment of despair, once Faina becomes more civilized she comes back in the spring and summer months and seems more real; she tans and leaves heavier footprints in the earth. 

This has been a useful exercise in helping me imagine the world where this story takes place. You can see the links to the stories events in the landscape and wilderness. The book has a mix of fantastical and fairytale with real and severe situations which reflects the beauty and magic and harshness of the landscape.

Quest lecture: Carolyn Gowdy

Today we had a quest lecture from artist/illustrator Carolyn Gowdy. I had no idea Carolyn was American until she started to speak and I was happy to have a whole lecture to listen to an American accent. Carolyn was born and raised in Seattle but has lived in England for the past 30 years or so.
It was really interesting listening to her story of how she came over to England and her first few years starting out as an artist.
Her work has been around for a long time and has influenced many other people. Her work features a lot of feminist ideas and she talked about creating a lot of series of works and how imagery reappears in her work.

Her work seemed quite conceptual and she spoke about communication of her work and how she tries to express ideas and transform in a way that's clear and accessible.

These are life portraits from a day at a fair, where Gowdy invited people to be drawn. The portraits were called poem people portraits. I think here you can see her rougher work, and how her style continues into printmaking and more developed pieces. 

Gowdys messages can be seen through the use of text in her work. I think her messages come across clearly this way, and she is successful in what she said about accessibility.  

Although Gowdy's style isn't really linked to the way I work or what messages I would want to give across I like her use of colour; subtle and muted but warm. I think colour can go a long way in creating mood and atmosphere in an image and that it something I can work with. 

Paper cut - quotes from book.

The first lines of 'The Snow Child' by Eowyn Ivey, which is the story I've decided to go with, set the character of Mabel well.

A couple move to Alaska to start a new life. Previously in Pennsylvania Mabel suffered a miscarriage and herself and Jack realise they cannot have children. One night while it's snowing they create a child out of the snow. The next day the red gloves and mittens are missing and they start to believe they see a child running through the trees. The child turns out to be Faina. Much of the book deals with Mabel's belief that this child is the child they made out of snow. It deals with 'cabin fever' in those long winter months, especially after remembering a story her literature professor father had when Mabel was young. Another family close by, the Bensons, become friends with Jack and Mabel and throughout the years go without seeing the girl, believing her to be a figment of their imagination. Towards the end of the story the way the girl is described is less magical and fairy like. As we find out early on Faina's father has died in the wilderness and she is out their alone with a fox who follows her for food, she disappears in Spring and Summer as she prefers the colder mountains, and the snow. Their are clues to lead you to believe she is real or unreal. Eventually the Bensons meet her, and as she grows she becomes more and more civilised. Eventually having a baby, marrying but then dying. As the snow child does in the fairytale.

The beginning passage describes the silence of the Alaskan wilderness and we meet Mabel as she is still in grief. The passage describes all the noises she could not hear; the clatter of toys or infants. I created this piece from the opening paragraph.

I like the idea of images interweaving with each other. The use of text isn't necessarily apt for book illustrations but there is possibility for promotional posters and displays.

Further Research and Tutorial

I had a tutorial with my tutor, Pete Lloyd yesterday in which I showed him the various research I had done. It went really well and where I was worried about what the content for my idea would be before I felt a lot more comfortable with choosing a sequential narrative to base my project on. He suggest that I look at a few theatre companies and exhibitions to help generate ideas for creating images.

Pollocks Toy Theatre

A shop and museum, both in London, have a collection of old and new toy paper theatres. They stem back to victorian times when they were used as recreation. Now they are more of a collectors item.



Eyes, Lies and Illusions

I got Eyes lies and Illusions out from the university library which was a book to go alongside an exhibition at the Hayward gallery. The book and exhibition 'explores the art and artifice of optical invention from the Renaissance to the present day.' The 'optical invention' just mentioned comes in projections, the use of light and shadow, the use of photography, film and animation and the explored the deception that can be used in art. The main inspiration and principal source for the exhibition was drawn from the collection of the German experimental film-maker Werner Nekes.

'And the same objects appear straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes the convex, owing to the illusion about colours to which sight is liable. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.' Plato, The Republic. 1894. (From Eyes, Lies and Illusions, 2004, Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes and Marina Walker).

This quote I included because it talks about how the creation of something fantastical, imaginary or dreamlike - unreal can be created by using very real methods like stagecraft and projections - simple or complicated - and that creates something new and magic, like the quote by Plato states.

There were a few things I picked out that I thought were really interesting and/or could be useful in my project.

First was 'Peppers Ghost', a trick that emerged from the rise of magic illusionism through the second half of the 19th century. The Pepper's Ghost could appear by use of a glass panel and projection, the image shows it working much better than I could describe it. At the same sort of time Houdini was making elephants disappear and the Davenport Brothers where elevating from chairs they were tied at hand and feet too - all by tricks of mirrors and projection (The Davenport Brothers claimed it was supernatural at the time Spiritualism was highly popular, but Houdini was a skeptic of spiritualism and wanted to expose frauds claiming supernatural phenomena)

(Engraving by Theodor Eckardt, 1881)

I  am really interested in this time in history and have always been intrigued by performers, magicians and illusionists of this time - including the whole spiritualism and belief in the supernatural that there was at the time. So I think partly the interest in the fantasy and surreal that I like in fairytales stems from this as well. 

The book also showcases contemporary artists who use similar techniques or ideas. Christian Boltanski has created some installations that use light and shadow to blow small objects up to large, obscure shadows on the surrounding walls. 

The work has a slight melancholy feel and usually centres on those gone; either dead or moved on from a certain time or place. I feel like the use of shadows in this instance is juxtaposed; shadows are created by something present. The pieces creating the shadows are present in the exhibition, would hiding the created pieces change the interpretation? This is something I can consider when creating pieces for my own project; considering the meaning and content and how that projects onto the way the pieces are created as well as what they look like. 

This installation is very similar to how I am imagining my final pieces to be; using shadow as part if not all of the artwork. The subject deals with ideas that are similar to the the story of The Snow Child. Here the pieces centre on what has passed, and the narrative looks at love and loss, heartbreak and hope. 

Théâtre de Complicité

Complicité is a theatre company based in London whose devised productions have "an emphasis on strong, corporeal, poetic and surrealist image supporting text" (Stephen Knapper, 2010, Contemporary European Theatre Directors). Their performances usually involve dazzling use of technology, such as projection and cameras, as well as lyrical and philosophical contemplation of serious themes. Their main principles of work are: "seeing what is most alive, integrating text, music, image and action to create surprising, disruptive theatre."

After reading about this company I think they have a very strong emphasis on communication to audience or viewer. It also integrates performance and movement.



Forkbeard Fantasy

Forkbeard Fantasy is a collective of artists whose work includes stage shows, films, animations, publications, peepshow installations and their hugely popular interactive exhibitions.


Forkbeard Fantasy are a multi-media theatre company. The idea of Forkbeard Fantasy came in the early 1970s with three brothers - Simon, Chris and Tim Britton. Simon was a painter and maker of kinetic mechanical sculptures; Chris, fascinated by experimental and physical theatre, devised constructions and gadgetry to perform within; and Tim, a poet, writer and cartoonist, could see how his imaginative world might be realized in live performance.


Very much out on a limb in the early days, Forkbeard soon found that they fitted most comfortably within the new wave of British experimental performance and performance art that had been burgeoning since the 1960s. It was a time of much mixing of media, kinetic and ‘living’ sculptures, performance art, happenings, poetry performance and squeaky-bonky jazz, all elements, art forms and media which were fast becoming as much to do with live theatre as the play and the text. But the mainstream theatre was reluctant to accept any of it at that time. As a result, much of it happened in galleries, pubs, music venues, clubs, festivals, fairs, streets, church halls and shop windows...and in the then tiny handful of arts centres which were only beginning to emerge.


Forkbeard have been producing and presenting their highly individual brand of comic surrealism, creating performances, theatre shows, films, cartoons, automata, sculptures, special events, installations and interactive exhibitions across the UK and abroad without stop since the mid 1970s. As such they are one of the UK’s longest surviving independent performing arts companies and certainly the oldest with the same original members still writing, producing and performing in all the shows. The work, always true to its struggling origins, still combines theatre with special effects, mechanical sets and contraptions, outsize puppetry and automata, and their particular trademark interactive mix of film, animation and cartoon live on stage – a medium now widely seen on the stage today but in which FF have long been seen as pioneers.


Forkbeard will happily talk of inspirations and influences as varied as Ealing Comedies, The Goons and Edward Lear, of Flann O’Brien, The Theatre of the Absurd, Frank Zappa, Tintin (to whom there’s rarely a show without at least one reference), to P.G.Wodehouse, Stanislav Lem, Tadeusz Kantor, Bruce Lacey, the 60s Happenings in the USA, Joseph Beuys and La Grande Magique Circus. But there are of course always many more. Forkbeard have always as enthusiastically embraced the old, the trickery and magic of vaudeville, Victorian stage illusion and early cinema pioneers, as they have modern art, technology and the endlessly unfolding possibilities of new digital media


(From forkbeardfantasy.com) 

This seems to be a projection onto a sculpted face. This reminds me of the work of Terry Gilliam.

(all artwork/models created by members of Forkbeard Fantasy) 

So there we go, I quoted Plato. I didn't think this project would get that deep. I think I was told to look at these various companies and creations to help me think about the possibilities in creating images. It would fit with what I'm interested in working with very well to create simple illusions and continue using light and shadow in my work. It also helps when thinking about possibilities of working with paper and paper craft to push the medium forward and make something different and new with it. 

Christian Bolkanski image:http://artplafox.blogspot.com/2010/11/6-eme-montrez-le.html
http://zepizzabox.blogspot.com/2011/07/sapotille_29.html

theatre illustion:http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/24/Warner.php

Presentation Document tutorial.

Today we had a tutorial with Alexandra who is helping us write this here thing properly. Our presentation Document has to be written in a certain way in order for us to talk reflectively about ourselves and about our work. I think it will take a few tries and some getting used to but the advice given today was very useful.

We started with a task where we had to create something within half an hour, it could be anything we wanted and it was so that we were a bit impulsive and went with our first reactions. After we were asked why we had created the image we had done, what that says about you and what that says about how you like to work, what that says about your interests.

Previous projects have been marked with us present and so we have been able to talk about our work as it is being shown. In this instance our our work is being marked separately and so to give across our thoughts, ideas and intentions clearly it is important that we write in a particular way and delve a bit deeper into the reasons we are creating such work.

I created a paper cut of a fox head. I realised I tended towards animals when drawing, due to ability to draw them and also to my attachment. I was asked why I had an attachment and spoke of my grandma who was very interested in nature, in particular she loved foxes. I remember photographs of her holding her hand out to a fox and always being amazed by it as a child. The back garden of my childhood home often had a set at the back of it, and I would see foxes run along behind our wall. I think the animals have just been on my mind as well recently as I have been looking at stories involving them.

This exercise was useful as it directly showed us how we are meant to approach this written work. We were able to talk about our process reflectively and explain clearly how we came about creating our images.