Tim's FAD

The delights of printing text  On Friday morning Sue Baker-Kenton  presented to Core on her career, work and the subject of residencies of which she has quite a bit of experience. Sue is known to FAD CityLit students for her Print skills but her story and career is far more wide ranging with training as an illustrator, time spent with good remuneration in animation and  a further degree after a break  away from Art raising a family (MA in Printmaking) along with teaching qualifications and Sue has been teaching since 2005. Sue has spent quite  a lot of time (and continues to) with various residencies including many residencies outside the UK - France Belgium and San Francisco (Crown Point Press) etching Lithographs all being places she has visited for different projects. Sue has worked on longish  residencies in the UK with a longish residency in Bracknell  Air South Hill parks Arts and another with a Leicester Print Workshop  as well as ones wit...

 As we had not yet received the  'Ciment Fondu' which will allow us to make a mould we continued with the project of carving clay Here are the steps my 'Hedgehog' went through ahead of the tacks being removed and it going to be dried. The underside with some excess removed Tool used to help take away clay Experimenting with tacks for spines Plenty of tacks but all removed ahead of drying! Ute also described some issues around Landscape schemes and reminded us of the importance of keeping in mind what we enjoy. Model making can be part of the process along with drawing in space it is useful when applying for art projects. Using public engagement (the community will feedback on what they might accept) and Education (to access other funding resources. A danger with public projects is a default to 'safe'. Ute also presented some visual information on the use of Colour in space to soften some schemes  (e.g. plants), the colour wheel can be our friend here.  Light i...

 On Wednesday Rod kicked of our sessions with an exercise in  representing some musical terms which for some reason/convention use Italian words  by default. I got three done - Agitato  Agitated Lentissimo - Slowly  and Sonoro Ringing   Agitato  Part of the 'challenge' was to be 'Abstract' - for me this seemed difficult to wholly buy into as it was to an extent representational. And I do fear that for the ringing I'm particularly guilty of this'.  Sonoro  Lentissimo  After this exercise we moved on to making an Abstract (-ish) series of frames to form a  narrative of something that we'd experienced. Again a challenge that has some built-in contradictions but which we all gave our best shots: A Day In The Life My series tells the story of taking a bicycle ride  on a sunny day and in suburban London  being hit by police car, going through legal channels and reaching another 'sunny' day with compensation. Tom Gauld was an...

 On Friday we met as part of 'core' to work as two small groups to see how we could prepare to consider a brief. Some of the brief can be seen alongside - We decided to look at the area around coal drops yard which included a large open area and also part of the University of Arts London-  The day was a cold post Christmas weekday with the blow of Covid still very present and these effects did impact the four us in a group. We met initially as  three and then went of on individual researches and met up later (with an additional member) and spoke of our rather negative feelings about what we'd seen. Industrial past A sign can help engage? The developers have not obliterated the past but perhaps have become too much a hostage to what has gone before - talking we felt that the area perhaps lacked some of what constitutes community. There were clear breaks between the area that had been developed and the 'outside world' and we spoke about how there was a model for redev...

 On Thursday Uté gave some more on how we might proceed with the clay we had started forming the week before. One thing that was useful was using plan and elevation views and orthogonal views to help us decide how we could handle the removal of material by carving. we were able to use the clay to give us an idea of  the physical material we would use by making an outline of the projections. I was working on a 3D 'Hedgehog' and it was pointed out that this could be Kitsch and also that it at some stages  looked a bit like a hippopotamus - hopefully I moved away from this and was able to convey spikes by marking the clay with holes. Sitting the item on a plinth Next week we'll do some more work on our clay and also have some time to experiment with Cement Fondu - and plaster casts. I am interested to try and create something around a  beef steak to denote gluttony 

 The session was introduced with some work by Richard Hamilton's  Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956) - this is cited by many as the start of 'Pop Art' in England. Rod also showed some works that referenced Hamilton's critique of consumerism including work from US artist Martha Rosler . Our work/exercise was to be about a collage set in a room. On Wednesday Rod also spoke to us about  Graphic Designer David Carson who rose to fame in the 1990's - David was active in the surfer community but had no formal training in Art, rising to become a respected figure through such magazines as Beach Culture  . In fact there's a nice video of David talking here . What I felt from finding out a bit about Carson was that the narrative about him is putting him forward as a maverick 'Surfer dude' who rose to the top on a special talent. He is an intelligent man who is a graduate and paid his dues through his work - it seems rather ...

  On Friday we got the chance to hear from teacher (Richmond amongst others)  and architectural glass artist Kirsty Brocks and it was fantastically interesting to hear about the projects, approach and philosophy behind her work. Kirsty explained how she chose to work independently and keep costs low, her work is around screen printing on glass for public areas, she seeks to use texture and light with subtlety and a large element in her work is the research which helps her embed a sense of place. Much of her work is via commission  and involves working with others and she is often consulting with the  communities who will live/see the places where the work will be deployed -one  of her biggest projects was   for the Study centre & Archive at St Johns |College Oxford and you can see her speaking about this here. Kirsty introduced us to the idea of making booklets - this was useful and fun (for me) in that the limited number of images and need fo...

British Museum Courtyard The second option I chose as  a specialisms   after  Vis Com  was  Sculpture  and for the first part of our initial day we checked out some of the Sculpture at London's British Museum this gave context and a chance to see how some of the practical obstacles have been handled in the past. Ute the teacher gave us some tasks which included looking at Egyptian, African and Greek work and to make some drawings too. Egyptian  Ute had suggested we consider how this would look if the dark and light were inverted A lot of the original remains  Ute also mentioned a nearby public work 'Chain of events' (1996) by Peter Randall- Page  In the afternoon Ute introduced us to some of the  projects we can work on - and we thought about some of the points that we might consider with public works we were looking at. We also saw some tools and materials for carving - we will approach some Clay with woodworking style and were ab...