This week I attended the Unit 5 briefings. We were given all the relevant information necessary for the upcoming project, the first of our second year. We have been told to make a series of deliverables based on 4 of our strongest pieces of work. This work can be from university, art foundation or any self-devised projects. I am looking forward to experimenting with the layout of my presentation deck to make sure it best showcases my strongest work of the last few years. As well as this, we must collect 40 references of what inspires our work. I am also looking forward to curating this list. I think it will be rather tricky for me to narrow the list down to just 40 references as I am influenced and inspired by so much. I am planning on curating a list of my favourite films, albums, songs, books, and artists to use for this list of references to back up my strongest projects. Hopefully there will be an explicit link between my favourite work and the work I create, showing my active influence and inspiration from art and design around me.
On Friday I attended one of the first in person workshops of this year. WE were given a short one-day brief entitled ‘Who Am I?’. This was an interesting brief for me to work on. I first started by looking at the work that inspires me in hopes of finding a place to start for my poster for this brief. A book I have been reading recently is called ‘100 Artist’s Manifestoes – From the Futurists to the Stuckists’ Selected by Alex Danchev. This book has been incredibly interesting, and I have immensely enjoyed exploring all the different kinds of manifestoes and proclamations from different artists of who they are and all about their work. I was recently reading a DADA manifesto written by Francis Picabia published in February 1920. The manifesto consists of 7 short chapters. Starting with CHAPTER I, ‘DADA has blue eyes, a pale face and curly hair; has the English look of young men who are keen on sport’. My favourite is CHAPTER III, ‘DADA has always been twenty-two, it’s slimmed down a bit in the last twenty-two years. DADA is married to a peasant girl who loves birds’.
Throughout art foundation I was heavily influenced by the DADA movement, my final piece being a series of 3 Dada animation inspired by the collage work of Hannah Hoch. Having had such a heavy influence from Dada I thought it a good place to start.
After unsuccessfully experimenting with trying to replicate the Dada letter press style I went back and reread the Picabia Manifesto and I thought about what drew me to it so much. I realised it was the light jovial and playful tone of the chapters – happy yet very expressive and still showing a lot of Picabia as an artist. Who was known for his experimental portraits, enlarged eyes, unrealistic colours with unnatural and swirling shapes. Linking back to the brief I was thinking about how I could show ‘Who I Am’. I wrote short lists of what I liked and what I didn’t like. Trying to capture the same kind of tone that was seen in Picabia’s CHAPTER III.
Since this project was a one-day brief, I ended up designing my poster as a kind of ID card. To be completely honest, I don’t really like the way it turned out. I think that I was just trying to make sure I finished the project in time for the end of the day and therefore I didn’t achieve the same affect I was hoping for in my work. I think that this may be a project that I chose to revisit if I can as the research portion of this brief was quite enjoyable.
Next week, my plan is to continue to research the way that different artists have explained themselves through their work and how this can be seen through their manifestoes. I want to gather as many resources as I can before I start making my presentation deck, this is because I want to figure out a way to best display my work.
