This week I was ill. I missed the Friday session and struggled to keep on top of my work and make much progress. It wasn’t great.
As I started to feel better around last Tuesday-ish, I began to think about making a mock-up of my project. Originally, I wanted to use cardboard to create the doll-house structure I needed in order to stage my dinner scene. However, I have since changed my mind as I felt the look of the cardboard dolls house was unpolished and not quite what I wanted. I considered using wood instead last week and now believe this is the best material to move forward with. I have emailed to inquire about woodworking labs that I might be able to book into and access but am yet awaiting a response, I will ask again during my Friday session tomorrow and hope to have the foundations built and finished by the end of this coming week.
Furthermore I received my wallpaper samples but hated each one (it’s not going well for me is it?) and so I’ve done further research and decided to order a few more as well as attempt to create and paint my own by drawing and by printing. They will hopefully all be ready in time for mid-next week when my foundations should be built.
I have also made it my mission this week to decide what material I want to use to make the food items; there have been suggestions of both clay and alginate but I’m still researching into even more potential materials I can use and hope to make a decision by the end of next week when, after I finish my foundations, I’ll begin working on the dinner. I am strongly considering both polymer and air-dry clays to work with as they are soft and good for miniature sculptures in my experience.
I have not yet properly begun thinking about the lighting, film, and sound aspects of my project but want to keep them in the back of my mind this week and have planned a library trip with a more musically gifted friend of mine to help guide me and suggest books, research materials, and techniques. This is the part of the project which will come later so naturally my focus has been on the more urgent aspects of my project.
I will use this latter aspect to link to the theme of site specific sound art, as I will create a small exhibit for an audience (potentially my friends and peers) and allow them to immerse themselves in all aspects of the installation. The unsettling sound that I’ll create will be tested on my peers as I work on it in the studio and I will use their feedback to perfect it and create the final project.
To conclude, this week has not been my best or most productive. Although, this did give me time to reflect and to plan/reach out to the necessary people. I will hopefully have a space in which to work and experiment in by this weekend and will begin creating! I will spend the next week hard at work, catching up with all that I missed this week and hopefully progressing on to bigger and more exciting things after a boring sick week.
Hi Naomi – some good work here well done. You’re developing your idea well and are showing some good research. You have a clear idea which is interesting and well articulated. Your writing is clear, reflective and well structured. Moving forwards, leave time to reflect on your creative rationale. Why are you doing this? What is the significance of this project? Your practice based research is in hand, you’re starting to make and you’re reflecting well on what works well and doesn’t. Be sure to show visual documentation of your practice based experiments and the making you’re doing – even where it doesn’t work as you want it to. Be sure to show consistent and careful research into the work of other artists and thinkers, and then explain why they are of interest to you, and how the artists you references are informing your own thought and artistic practice. Explain the significance and why they interest you. I think the key thing for you to focus on over the next week is creative experimentation, making and research to help contextualise your idea. Make sure you stay up to speed with your posts and post week 4 and 5 this week. Looking forward to seeing more next week and the following!