Category: Field

Day 1:

The first day of our Ceramics assignment was to head off around campus finding and photographing interesting shadows that we found inspiring as a group. Here are a few of my favourites:

I like this one because the shadow in isolation looks like a cityscape or a castle rather than an egg box like piece of packaging. I like the shadows cast on the piece by the texture too.

A random scrumpled bit of duct tape makes fascinating shadows

I love the simplification of form in the shadow

Shadows that totally represent the original object – couldn’t be anything else.

Distorted shadows

Double light source, duplicating the shadow and making it look like a whole jungle rather than a single plant.

We then spent an hour making sketches of these photo’s:

Then the afternoon cutting them out and making 3d maquettes with card:

I enjoyed how when I abstracted this part of the plant shadow and made it a 3d maquette, it created it’s own range of interesting shadows.

Day 2:

On day 2 we were taught some clay working methods – slab building and joining with cross-hatching and slip, coiling and extruding in the morning and pinching in the afternoon.

This was my attempt at slab building, based on the plant shadows, using the cross hatching and joining with slip method. It worked – when fired it stayed in one piece! I like the simplicity of the piece and the range of shadows that it can make (see below)

This piece was made from extruded clay from my imagination rather than being based on a photo of shadows, but I could see the potential for it to cast interesting shadows.

In the afternoon we were shown how to make pinched pots using oyster sized lumps of clay, pinched into rounds and used to build a vase. Had we had time, we would then have smoothed the surface with a kidney to create a tall vessel with a handle of our choice. It was important to smooth afterwards rather than as you go along in order to retain the strength in the bottom of the pot.

Lawrences pot

Jacks pot

Wojciechs lattice bowl

At this point I fell ill with a chest infection, so we were unable to continue working collaboratively in our own time. I popped back in on the following Thursday afternoon to take some photo’s of the finished pieces in the photography suite with directional lighting to enhance the shadows and to make a still life. Unfortunately I couldn’t find Wojciech’s pieces, but I incorporated 1 of Jacks and 2 of Lawrences:

It’s a shame we didn’t have the chance to work more collaboratively – it would have been good to discuss a composition of 4 components that would come together as a single piece, however I do like the contrast of shapes and shadows that our pieces created – all so different! Organic, angular, smooth, spikey, repetitious, singular.

I would have liked to have had the opportunity to discuss and explore the hidden symbolism of artefacts in the ‘Vanitas’ style of still life with my group and considered making a group of objects that had a hidden meaning, for example the skull, extinguished candle or hourglass are traditionally used as a reminder of the transience of existence, downward pointing triangles representing femininity, butterflies representing the human soul etc…

I would also have liked the opportunity to discuss the possibility of making a single group piece out of several components to cast shadows on each other rather than on a flat surface.

The Interior Design/ADT brief was to create 2 x A2 interior collages using Photoshop reflecting 2 opposing words which were to be drawn out of a hat. Our words were Global/Parochial. Our team was made up of myself and Lawrence from Maker, Wojciech from ADT & Jack from Interior design.

Our ideas developed from discussing the various associations we had from each word, starting with global. We started with words rather than images to get us started – something we could do together rather than silently scrolling through images individually.

The words we came up with were things like:

Global: Worldwide, business, corporate, open, expansive, tribal, space, agoraphobia, light, optimistic, huge, massive, vast, travel, flags, countries, cities, landmarks, continents, oceans, artefacts, Pitt Rivers Museum, encompassing etc…

From here we started to look at the slides we were provided with and started to think about how we could interpret these words into images. For example, we thought about the light and decided this should be bright and natural, initially thinking the building should be made of windows, then realising we didn’t actually have to create walls – it didn’t have to be a room, so we scrapped that idea. To represent the Corporate aspect, we decided to have a central character looking optimistically out & up in a business suit, looking out over the ocean towards the world with a path leading across the ocean representing the journey. We looked at the meaning of colours – the colours for optimism are yellow and orange, so we selected a horizon showing the sun rising in yellow and orange hues. Wojciech created the final Global image with our supervision & using images that we had all sourced:

 

For Parochial, I was the only one who had heard of the word, and then only as an insult – as in ‘you’re soooo parochial!’, so after a little group dictionary diving and discussion, we came up with the following word list:

Parochial: Local, small, traditional, relating to the church, narrow, claustrophobic, cosy, inward, insular, intolerant, restricted, conventional, petty, crafts, sentimental, closed, community, focused, pessimistic.

Initially we threw ourselves into this image without giving it much thought and looked for a typical Welsh home interior incorporating lots of traditional Welsh crafts such as blankets and lovespoons and daffodils, but we struggled to make a cohesive image.

After a frustrating day, we got chatting in our WhatsApp group that evening and decided we needed to take a step back and think about the presentation – the final 2 images needed to work together – reflecting but opposing each other. We still needed the central character, but this time rather than a business suit he needed to be in manual labour apparel. Rather than bright, natural light we needed gloomy artificial light and rather than having this feeling of space it needed to be enclosed. Thinking in this way made it clear that we needed to find an image in a mine – very Welsh, very dark and dreary and very claustrophobic!

From a maker point of view, our main contribution was the corporate versus local handicraft/small business aspect.  I know as a maker this includes Photoshop skills, however I would have been much happier getting my hands dirty and making a maquette rather than a photoshop collage. I watched the photoshop tutorials and contributed to the image manipulation on the Parochial image though, finding the main image of the miner in the mine, adding the dying daffodils & editing the Welsh flag photo to look grubby and ragged to fit in with the lighting and mine theme. It was agreed, however, with limited time remaining that Wojciech was much better & quicker at it, so he took it from there, improving the daffodils, love spoon and adding his nod to the religious origins of the word with the bobblehead Jesus.

I think we worked well together as a team – we communicated well, made equal contributions and I think we came up with successful final images. I wasn’t comfortable with collaborating – I have learned through my working life that I am not naturally a team player – I am much happier working on my own. Even as a manager I found it hard to delegate, preferring to do the work myself than entrust it to others. Luckily there were 4 of us – if only 2 or 3, I am likely to take over, 6 or more and I will slink into the background. This is something I am very aware of, so I haven’t necessarily learned anything about how I work with others, but I am 42 when the majority are 19 – I can see it’s a worthwhile aspect of the exercise for them.

I had no idea so much was taken into consideration when creating an interior – you are creating a feeling, experience or state of mind by using the features such as light, space, colour, texture, shape and decorative items as tools. Very interesting.

We had a group critique of our design sheets with Pip today. There were 7 of us in the group. One of the main things that became apparent was that my lights smart application was quite niche! Not quite as niche as Martha’s – a light in the shape of her Italian ancestral home that would be linked to the properties motion sensors and flash when edible dormice were running about to annoy her grandad, but niche!  I could see the further potential for Martha’s idea though, which opened my mind to other, less niche uses that mine could be put to.

Martha’s movement sensors could be used for anyone with a second property either in the UK or overseas to alert the owner of movement and get someone to check it out, whether it be pest control for rodent visitors or police for human! My pressure sensors could be used for all sorts of things too – for anyone who keeps stores of anything and needs alerting when something needs replenishing, they could be placed under a doormat to count footfall or to trigger an intruder alert. I had been very focused/blinkered on the beekeeping idea without looking at the bigger picture, so the group critique opened me up to new possible end uses for my design.

Not much was said about mine, I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing!  I had covered most bases – I had researched artists who had influenced my design, researched materials, researched the market for similar existing products, researched my target audience, all of which were picked up as areas to explore further with other members of the group.

It was interesting to see that everyone had developed an idea that would be useful or helpful in some way – nothing entirely aesthetic or frivolous was brought to the table. I felt really sorry for a couple in the group who had got so far with their idea’s only to find upon continued research that their product was either already in production, or had been rendered obsolete by new scientific thinking – lesson learned – do thorough research before investing too much time, energy or money in a project!