Last week as one of the introductory tasks that all BA Fine Art students must undergo until Christmas, I had to create a piece of art work that relates to the word 'Scavenge'. On Tuesday, I went to Nottingham's Hyson Green to forage around the urban landscape for objects/sounds. The word scavenge could be interpreted in whatever way fits my ideas. I chose to walk around the place taking photos of various objects and scenes that come across to me as interesting or peculiar. The more I took photos the more I realized a recurring theme of the colour blue.
What was great about these photos was that they were unexpected; they were spotted in odd places. My particular favourite is the bottle cap hung upon a branch in a bush. The writing inside reads 'GDZIE GOLINGUJEMY' which I believe to be some form of anagram as i have managed to find a vast variety of short and longer words such as 'enemy', 'lemming' and 'gin'. I thought originally these new found words could be used as the basis for my work that had to be ready by the following Friday of that week.
Back in the studio I made sketches of these objects by combining them together as a montage on one page using a blue colour marker pen. The lines I created by not taking my pen off the page made me remind myself of the advantages of exciting textures and relief using embroidery. This is how I found my medium to work with for this piece of work. So I used a view finder to cut of a small section of the original sketch to use as my template for creating a embroidery piece of Calico.
From Wednesday through to Friday I created the piece that I chose to keep in its embroidery hoop as it acts as a makeshift frame and a device for the piece to be kept taught upon the wall. I used pins to keep the work on the wall with the excess Calico cascading underneath. Which I find gives the work a rustic quality.
Last weekend I visited Nottingham Contemporary's new exhibition featuring international artists 'Angieszka Polska' and 'Raphael Hefti'. What really impressed me was the first piece of sculptural installation By Hefti. Long metal poles lean somewhat precariously against the walls and roof of the gallery space. There was a great fragility about it because i thought the work could easily be knocked over by gallery goers including myself. But, there must have been some form of security fixing the poles securely in place; this is one of the other things i found interesting is that these attachments are so well hidden.
