College, 21st May

Things are hotting up at college, towards the final assessment and end-of-year show next month.  We only have one more Monday studio session after today.... and there is still a lot to do.

This morning started with a group tutorial with Mark, mainly about writing our evaluations, and preparing for the show.  After that, we were free to work on our projects.  I had booked a video camera and tripod to film my paper scraps, and I had brought in a large box full of scraps, plus some black cloth as a backdrop. 

After a quick tutorial from Wesley about how to use the video camera, I wandered the college searching for a quiet place in which to film.  The only place seemed to be the cubby-hole where people can store portfolios, a tiny broom-cupboard of a room, with very little floor-space but with a door which closed.

I set about rigging up black cloth and sheets of thick black paper to make a backdrop and to block out the racks of portfolios, and then squeezed the tripod into a corner, with the box of strips balanced on a cupboard.  

Off I went - switching the camera on to run on its own, and scattering strips from above.  The trouble with this was that, because of the tiny space, I couldn't actually see into the monitor of the camera, and had no idea how the film was coming through.  When I paused, to zoom in and then out, I still couldn't really see if the angle was any good.  

When I finished, and had a look, it seemed to me that the lines of sight were very short and constrained (they really were!) and although the film had worked on the most basic of levels, it was hardly going to make good piece.  Rather dispirited, I gathered up all the paper scraps, undid the black screens, and trailed back to the print room to reconsider.  I was close to giving it up as a bad idea.

But then I realised that, during the lunch hour, other rooms were empty and quiet, and also more pscaious.  I went into 04, the painting room, and it was empty of people.  I found a bit of floor-space and covered it with black card.  I found Maeve-Ann, who had been saying, earlier, that she was not terribly busy, and asked if she would give me a hand, which she did very willingly.  With Maeve-Ann operating the camera, I could concentrate on dropping the scraps.  We shot one film, just of the scraps falling, and then we gathered them all up and shot another 5 minutes, this time with me in the shot, dropping the paper pieces.  This looked much better, and the pile of scraps grew wonderfully on the studio floor.  Since I had cut more over the weekend, I hadn't seen the size of the full pile before... and it is now BIG!

Then Maeve-Ann set the camera running again without telling me, and so we had a third, quite long, piece of film showing me playing with the scraps, rather like playing with sand on a beach, and she and I talking about what they mean, as we gathered them up and put them back in the box a second time.  The heap was so big, it was possible to dig right into it and make mountains and sharp jagged sculptures out of them.  Some of them reminded me of the images of the twin towers after 9/11, when the jagged pieces of the buildings stood out against the sky.  Some just reminded me of playing with sand-castles with children, letting the strips fall through your fingers, and watching the shifting shapes of he mound as they moved.   It was great fun to do, and surprisingly tactile.  Actually, the whole business of dropping the pieces was extremely satisfying, and cathartic.  It really did feel as I'd intended, as though I was letting go of years of academic study.  It might have felt better still if I'd been able to use real work papers, but in the end it hadn't proved possible to get hold of those kind of papers.  And over the decades I have sweated quite enough blood over academia too.  

By the end of half an hour or so, I had really quite a decent amount of film - and I'm very grateful to Maeve-Ann for her help as it was very tricky to get the angles right and I would have been struggling to do all this on my own, and it was also very good to discuss it with her as we worked.

Later I saw Wesley who helped me down-load the film from the camera, and showed me the briefest outline of how to edit it using i-movie.  So tomorrow I will see if I can take the best bits of these films and transfer them into a single run which would be fit for showing on the show-reel in the final exhibition.  If need be, Wesley has offered to help me get this right.  Also Mary, who has done some film editing during her A-level course. So I will be well-blessed with advice on this...and I'm sure I'll need it as I'm still struggling to get onto the same intuitive wavelength and the Mac designers.  

I also had a useful tutorial with Mark this afternoon about my plans for the final show, and the idea of having a kind of 'sand box' on a plinth in which the strips will be placed, and people encouraged to handle them.  I then saw Jan in the workshop and have left him a drawing and instructions about materials, dimensions, etc, and he says he will make this for me for next week.   I had thought I'd like the box about 3' x 2'6"... but on the way home I thought perhaps a square would be much better, to allow the pieces to fall in a circular mound, and so tomorrow I will alter this to ask for a 3' square box.

I finished the day feeling I had made real progress and cemented my plans for the final show - which fortuitously also require very little by way of further preparations, once the film is edited.  Which means I can concentrate now on tidying up my sketchbook, organising my research file, filling the gaps in this blog, and also preparing my portfolio for the UWE interview on 12th June.

College, 15th May

This afternoon I decided to do a proper reflection and review of my project so far, because I feel as though I have been getting stuck, not making progress, flitting from one idea to another, and not getting on even with the essentials, e.g. updating my note/sketch/ideas book, or finishing my research folder.  Luckily, most people were busy and so the main print room was almost empty and quiet, so I could settle down and read through everything, starting with my original Statement of Intent.  It proved to be a very therapeutic process, as it reminded me of the strong ideas I had started out with, and allowed me to see (a) how much exploratory work I have done, which seems to me to be quite a lot, and quite wide-ranging; and (b) to see that I have been on a rather circuitous journey, but that I have now almost arrived at a place which makes sense for the final presentation of my project.  I came away at the end of the day feeling a lot happier, and with a (long) list of things i now need to do to finish off the background.research/ideas work, and to complete the pieces for the final show.

There will be two pieces.  One will be a properly made film of the paper shreds falling.  I've booked a video camera and tripod for Monday, and will bring all the paper shreds into college and find a quiet place to do the filming here on Monday.  That should leave plenty of time on Tuesday to edit the film, and it can go on the group 'show reel' which will be prepared and run continuously during the show.

Secondly I'm going to organise a big flat tray-shaped plinth, ideally about a metre square but it will probably have to be a bit smaller than that.  It will have an upright 'wall' all round it, about 5 or 6 inches high.  Inside I will line with black paper and/or paint it matt black.  I will pile up all the shreds of paper inside the box.  The idea will be to invite visitors to touch the paper, to pick it up and door it, run their hands through it, like sand in a sand-pit.

I may, if time allows, also make a small book to go alongside the paper box, to link the box and the film with the concept of deconstruction,  throwing away, creating new.

I am trying to hang on to the principle of "less is more" but my piece is so conceptual I'm a bit worried that it may be too obscure.  But it depends how well the film comes out...and/or whether the pieces in a big aback box work either.  I might end up with just one or the other but not both.  NO harm in having options, even at this late stage.....

College, 14th May

We had a very useful, if scary, session first thing, for the whole cohort, full- and part-timers, about preparing for the end of year show next month.  We have to make definite proposals for exhibition space/walls/plinths/film/whatever next Monday, so this was very helpful preparation, and lots of advice on why not to do, what works, what doesn't, giving ourselves enough time to hang properly, etc, etc.  This was followed up by workshop time, which I hadn't prepared for very well, so I ended up doing some late library work, checking references for my research file and bibliography, and so on.  I did, though, have a useful tutorial with matt, and firmed up y ideas for making some kind of short film of my paper shreds falling.  I did a try quick test piece yesterday, holding my i-phone camera in one hand, and gently dropping the paper shreds with the other. It worked in terms of showing that the images could be made to work, and - most of all - the sound was good.  I had put big sheets of black paper onto the kitchen floor, and the sound of paper falling on to paper was strong - when the flow of paper built up, the sound was rather like heavy rain, or running water.