Taking it all back home

Today was packing up day, last day in college, and results day.  All rather sad, but also joyful.

It is interesting how much quicker it is to take something down, than to put it up!  College was stripped bare by 10.30, while it had taken days to get it all cleaned and tidy and hung.  Hmm. 

Here is my pile of things, looking rather forlorn, and ready for a taxi home.

I decided to bring all the cut strips home.  I think they still have life in them, and if all else fails, I can turn them into paper mache bowls.....

Oh, and we got our results, and I was delighted and not a little stunned to get a Distinction!

Doing Foundation has been an absolutely brilliant thing, has transformed the way I think about art, myself, things in general. has given me new skills and awareness, some new friends, and a new direction.  I am so grateful to the college and the tutorial team for leading us through it all, and for being such great people. 

So now for a long summer, keeping myself busy (there is lots to be done) and trying to focus a little on print-making and what I want to get out of the MA course at UWE.  And doing as much as I can of drawing, mark-making, printing, photography, looking at art, and thinking.  And perhaps, even, remembering how to use my sewing machine and doing a bit of much-neglected quilting too.

Final Show

The Final Show at Queens Road previewed on Friday night, and then ran until Tuesday, with a rota of students taking turns to steward it.

The opening night was a great success - but ridiculously crowded.  Over 100 students were finishing, and the college space is tiny, so it was quite a squeeze with parents and children and friends all winding round the corridors trying to see all the work.

I thought the standard was generally pretty high, and it was good to see the finished work of so many of the full time students, who we have had very little to do with most of the time.  Here are some images of some of the work I particularly liked, but I fear I did not always securely attach names to images, so some are unattributed.

I really liked several of the painters' work, but especially this one by Georgia Smith.

This was an amazing construction of a garden shed, complete with a full complement of bits and pieces.

These face casts were cleverly located half-way down the stairs to the ceramics studio.  

This was by Maeve Anne, who is going on to do an MA in Dublin, and is about the way we perceive meaning in relation to images.  It was huge, about 4 ft in diameter. 

This complex map of Easton, a Bristol neighbourhood, was by Jo Knight, and represented the women in this culturally and ethnically diverse area, and recorded the places they had come from. Jo did a series of taped and transcribed interviews with the women too.

This is part of a group of pieces by James Norman, called The Departed, which was about the loss of lives in the First World War.  This piece is a relief, rather than a painting, and includes a muddied and battered pair of soldiers' long-johns, and a lot of hatred fruit, and ash, and quite a lot of mud and pva as well as paint.  James also had a small excavation in the college back yard, and a very moving continuous sound accompaniment, of his reading, in dead-pan tones, a random selection of lines from Wilfred Owen's wars poetry.  It sounds chaotic when described like this, but in reality was both moving and visually (and aurally) exciting.  James is going on to do a BA in Fine Art at UWE 

And finally there was my box of bits of paper.  I attached a note to the box, in the hope that people would play with the scraps: 

deconstructing 

a life in words and paper

shredded, scattered and strewn

feel free to touch, delve, build, search find

de-constructing is also re-constructing

It seemed to work - people did investigate, and lift and dig and sculpt with the paper., so I achieved a result in terms of getting people to engage with the feel of the paper, and perhaps to think about how we throw things (including ideas) away, and how ephemeral our work can be.

 People also seemed intrigued by the tiny snatches of meaning on the scraps of paper strip - and they lifted them up to read and wonder about the words, and to search of other interesting snippets.  Someone said it was a bit like getting Fortune Cookies at a Chinese restaurant.  Or a Christmas lucky dip.  

Overall, I was quite pleased with how the show went, and how my pieces fitted in to the whole.  My film was on the show reel with 7 others, os it was quite a challenge for people to sit and watch the whole lot.  But whenever I went in to the film room, people generally were sticking with it, even though there was no punch line.  I didn't hear any negative comments so I guess that was as much as i could hope for.  I rather liked the film, anyway.

Finished at last!

I have spent the best part of the last few days doing all the last bits and pieces for my Foundation Diploma assessment and the final show.  Our work has to be delivered to college on Monday for assessment and the final show opens on Friday evening.

I thought I had more or less got everything done, but there was still a lot - including the bibliography and project evaluation.

Well, at last it is all done, and all packed up in boxes and folders ready to take in on Monday.  And here it all is.....

And I am feeling quite cheerful about the work itself, and the way it has all come together. My two complementary final pieces can't be shown here, although I will have some photos later on, once the show is done.  

I am submitting a short film I made at college which is  of thousands of little strips of cut-up paper falling into a big heap on the floor, complete with sound.  

And secondly an installation consisting of a big flat open wooden box, 3' square and sitting on a pedestal about 3' high, which will be filled with those same strips.  Visitors will be invited to delve into the heap with their hands, to pick up the strips and drop them again, to listen to the sounds they make, to pile them up into weird and wonderful shapes and sculptures, and generally to experience the exhilaration of letting go of an old life full of words and papers and essays and report writing, in exchange for a new freedom to create and experience textures, sounds, sights and shapes. 

Well, that's what I hope will happen.  I have a private nightmare that the plinth will get knocked over and the paper scraps will be spread across the floor....  I am a little worried about the location I've been given within the exhibition rooms, and may need to negotiate about this when I take everything in on Monday.

I am so pleased to have it finished!  But what on earth will I fill my time with now?  One urgent task is to give the house a much-needed clean and tidy.  The kitchen has been totally invaded for weeks, and somehow things have found their way into every corner of the house.  

So, given the continuing rain and wind, what better way to spend Saturday afternoon than having a good old tidy? Actually I can think of a great many nicer things to do, but needs must....

And the second thing to do, which is definitely nicer, is to make the Ginger and Rhubarb loaf which my lovely daughter Charlie has just up-loaded onto her blog charliemakescakes.blogspot.co.uk and which sounds scrumptious.    

almost there

This week is focussed on getting everything ready for the final show.  Monday was spent in college, helping with the mammoth tsp of transforming the relatively small studio space at Queens Road into an exhibition space.  Lots of 4x8 boards of mdf, lots of white paint, lots of planning and direction from tutors and cheerfully willing hands from students.  Amazingly somehow it all works, and quite quickly too.  

Now all I have to do is the fine tuning of my sketch book, project diary, research file, developmental pieces, project evaluation.  So much, suddenly, to do and so few days left.

Yesterday I had my interview for the MA Multi-disciplinary Printmaking at UWE.  It is such a great course, I have fingers and toes crossed in the hope that they will offer me a place.  I've been down to see the degree shows at Bower Ashton twice now: some really great work in printmaking, drawing, illustration.  I so hope I can be part of it soon....

College week 5/3 Digital Imaging 4th October

Tuesday meant a whole afternoon in the Mac Suite with Gareth, in theory working on the stamp project we have to complete by end November.  My memory for using Photoshop etc is abysmal, so I was needing a great deal of help to do even the simplest things.  I think I can now at least open and create layers, and use  a few basics like the crop tool and the move tool.  But I need to do a great deal more in this department or I will never get the hang of it.