Quite a lot has happened over the last few weeks, and I feel
my practice is finally starting to gain some movement and rhythm.
After spending quite a lot of time thinking, I decided that
during the Easter break I would ban myself from my laptop and note book...and
give myself one whole week of making. No words allowed (ish).
I sat at my bench with the samples I had made already; and like
I had done earlier in the unit with my found objects, I interrogated them. I
choose particular samples that I liked the most and tried to identify to myself
why I liked them. Was it the form?
The size? The notion of function? I then took each sample and recreated
variations of it; I asked ‘what if?’ questions like, “what if it couldn’t sit
flat on the table?” or “what if I combined elements of two samples?” this
helped me to identify and acknowledge functions and details that I really liked
within the samples.
After a visiting The Whitworth as part of my professional
platforms unit, I was inspired by their ethos and the new brand they are
promoting. All the work exhibited in the gallery and products for sale in the
shop are carefully selected to represent pioneering, playful and intelligent
practitioners. I have tried to reflect this attitude in my own work, bringing a
light-hearted approach to my experimentations, not worrying or overthinking
things and just ‘doing’.
As well as “what if?” questions, I decided to isolate
samples I liked the most, and created their families, for example, the samples
skinny Aunty, its fat Uncle or its Siamese twin cousins. I found this new way
of sample making extremely fruitful, it allowed me to very quickly create a lot
of variations, not worrying about what it’s
going to be. At this point in the project, I am not concerned with making
samples that are directly obvious as jewellery; I am purely concentrating on shapes,
forms and the visual communication they portray.
Because of my newfound interest in the language of objects
and the way colour, materials and form can influence a person’s perception of
something, I went and bought lots a brightly coloured yarn, some colourful false
nails and nail varnish, charity shop blue & white china, and some water
clear resin. I started to experiment with setting the different everyday
materials in the resin, first simply in some ice cube trays. I liked the way
that the water clear resin seemed to intensify and light up the colour of the
objects trapped inside. I also made some simple tube settings and used glass
lenses for bases, a simple but effective way to act as a carrier for the resin.
I like the combination of the brass with the resin; it immediately created ‘jewellery’
like appearance to the samples.
After making quite a lot of samples, I lay them together on
a plain sheet of paper; I could see clear patterns had started to form, I could
identify my favourites, and decide which aesthetics I thought were successful
and which weren’t. It helped me to know where to go next, or should I say what
to make next!
While I have been spending a lot of time in my studio
making, I have noticed how I seem to be most intrigued and attracted to the everyday,
practical elements of creating. For example, the circle of cereal box cardboard
I made and used to create hand made rope, the strips of masking tape used to
measure out rings that I stick in my notebook for future reference, or the way
the sticky tape labels are wrapped around each length of tube, identifying its width
and thickness. I have also started to really like the photographs I take of my samples
in situ; where they were made, on the wooden, scratched and burnt bench, amongst
the tools that created them. This is something I need to further question in my practice...what is it about these things that I am attracted to? How does using and holding them make me feel? Is it about doing? About movement or relationships? I'm not exactly sure yet, but this is what I need to underpin and find out in order for me to feel like I have grounding and clarity in my practice.
“The true secret of
happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life”
William Morris
