Reuse

The main theme for my course until the end of November is Reuse. It is a really wide theme when you start to look into the way artists have reused ideas and cultural norms from the past in their work. I am only just touching the tip of the iceberg at the moment. I had to make something as well, which was a more obvious path for me. It was something of a light relief to be honest.

I collected a pile of packaging, it’s surprising how quickly this is done, and then worked out how to use the plastic instead of fabric to make a bowl. I intend to make some paper beads, probably from colour supplements, to hang around the edge. It actually feels very firm and quite nice.

Derek Jarman's Garden

Last Wednesday 49 of us went on a site visit to Dungeness in Kent. I hadn’t heard much about the place until the visit, but it is a favourite place for photographers and artists. There are numerous images on Flickr of the area and a current workshop on ‘Workshop on the Web’ is by Gwen Hedley who has used inspiration from the area extensively in her work.

It was a gloriously sunny day. We worked in small groups with the brief to make a structure at least a metre high from debris found on the shingle beach. It is the largest area of shingle in Europe and also a Nature Reserve. We also had to take at least 10 photos and make 10 drawings/ sketches. It was all a bit of a rush with no time to really get the atmosphere of the place, but as far as working together and achieving some kind of an outcome it was successful. The topic for the work which will continue over the next weeks is Reuse.
We had the chance to visit the garden of Derek Jarman,artist and Film Producer, at Prospect Cottage. He spent his final years there and used rusted machinery parts and bits of weathered wood to fashion a garden in the flat shingle surrounding his fisherman's cottage.

Enrolment Week

This week I started my Art and Design Access Course along with about 50 other people of all sorts of ages and backgrounds. It was exhausting even though mostly I was listening and trying to absorb new information. I hope to keep up my blog and document some of the work and ideas from the course which is two days a week. There seems to be an overwhelming amount of work this term so we shall see; I hope not to disappear but if I do you will know what I am up to. The project I dread most at this stage is 3DD design, when apparently we have to package an egg securely and send it safely throught the post; I'm not very acurate at cutting and measuring.

Material experimentation on Friday was not too much of a challenge as our group got Hessian, tracing paper, wire, and thread to work with. Not to speak of a needle! We had a list of words to interpret such as layering, scratching, binding, interlacing, transparency. It reminded me of one of my first embroidery experiments which was Drawn Thread Work and we used Hessian then; at that time we went on to needleweaving..

I worked some small samples and then laced them together. I stitched a sort of maths formula and withdrew some threads. I liked the little packages holding the withdrawn threads.