Workspace and assessment

(My studiospace for the assessment)

******

I got my results back a while ago and I did really, really well! I'm very happy, I just hope I do as well in my next two electives.

Darkroom Photography

Developing film into negatives, negatives to a contact sheet, and then into photographs.  There is definitely a sort of magic in taking all these steps and watching an image appear before your eyes.
I also experimented with damaging negatives and developing the results.

(section of a negative that I have tampered with/drawn on)

Test contact sheet - showing the varying exposure times

Sample contact sheet


And the final photos: 

Video work

Here are some of the other videos I shot whilst exploring the process of cracking:

Sculpture Week Two: Growth; Development

Week Two, for me, was definitely more about taking what I had learned in the first week and going one step further with it; to get out of my comfort zone and work on a larger scale.
Taking inspiration from some of Goldsworthy's work (i.e. his Clay-covered rocks), I decided to make my own interpretation/variation centering around the same idea.

Here is how I made the work:

I took a large sheet of brown paper and scrunched it up...

I then began to cover the piece in clay...

slowly working my way around...

until the entire piece was covered.



Because these two weeks were so short, I needed to find a way to make the clay dry quickly and crack just as easily.  Immediately I thought of using some sort of blow-torch, but first I needed to dry out the wet clay - so I put it into a drying cupboard in the college to leave overnight.

(I also tried using an industrial hand dryer on the ball, but I found that this process was too slow and the cracks that formed were far smaller than I had originally intended ) 

The next day I took the ball home, and used a blow-torch to damage the piece further...and also my dad helped...just a little.

Sculpture : More of the same...

I took this brief as an oppurtunity to explore various media that I may not have touched on in the past, such as Video and Sound.  This was a deliberate choice on my part and an obvious one: to make work in different ways - to take a risk with this project, to learn and develop, and grow as an artist.

Sketchbook - Film Sequences
How does slate break up? What happens when I film it? The method, the process and the result.

The Video

(wore a helmet, of course...)

*****

Andy Goldsworthy

(will update with research here soon)

And my resulting experiments...

Hardened clay (dried out in an ordinary oven) covering a scrunched up ball of brown paper.

My original plan was to film the hardened clay ball being hurled at a wall and smashing, but instead I dropped the piece by accident.  At the time I had only made one (and this itself had taken several hours), so I photographed it and found that I liked these results even better; each crack and each fold of hardened paper could be seen so clearly through the power of the lens - I would definitely have to look into working with photography before these two weeks were up.

And going off on a bit of a tangent...

(recycling some of the crumpled paper from earlier in the week...

...and covering it in wax)

Not so much of a success, but enlightening; the wax didn't crack like I would have hoped.