dope hat

I viewed this video and used it as inspiration for my moving image piece, as I have always found it to be very interesting. There is always something new to see.

Art - a gleaners paradise?

Frances Hansen came in to talk with us about her art and processes. We also viewed a short film about gleaning. Or in other words, the job of picking up scraps after a harvest is finished. Also, we took a trip to the city in order to view a few galleries, in particular two rooms.

When Frances began to talk about the materials she likes to use within her art, it intregued me that her processes were very similar to that of a gleaner. The first step she takes whenever she wishes to make art is to collect. She spoke of often visiting second hand stores or even local dumps to find these materials. Often her materials were pure rubbish. Cardboard, pot plant tags, plastic slips or bags. Retro whicker trays were a favrite. Things that people would usually think little of and throw away. But not Frances. As a gleaner, people collected items which had been disguarded due to breakages, faults, or purely from being old stock, using them for their own personal use. This can include food, furnature, or other items of interest, mainly because they were poor, or had little money for new items. Frances was being just as economical. By gleaning for the materials she needed, she took pleasure in knowing that the objects she has gathered from the dump or local op shop would now have a brand new life. An extended life, transformed into pieces of art. They would no longer be adding to the dump.

As we viewed the two rooms gallery, another artist we viewed who enjoys collecting materials to work with Judy Darragh. Most of her Art is compiled from gleaned objects. There was a large installation work composed out of hundreds and hundreds wine corks, dipped in various colours of paint. She too, makes new life from dead objects.

I read about this artist in detail from the two rooms website, http://www.tworooms.org.nz it states - "Throughout her career, Judy Darragh has brought to our attention the flagrant waste of the consumer society by using our left over debris to make witty sculptural assemblages and installations shamelessly reeking of sentiment."

Her art is a representation of our gluttonous wastages. It amazes me at how many bottles of wine must have been drunk to equate to the ammount of wine corks she had collected from the streets to create her artwork with. The image above is a photograph compiled of small toys that she has sprayed silver, and dripping with various melted acrylic sheets. In Franceses case, her cheap materials come to a big advantage, selling her two dollar trays for over 100 dollars a pop! All she has done is add her own personal element to each tray. Now Thats what I call a profit! If we all decided to waste less of our waste we too could make cash from trash, and save the environment all at the same time! Couldn't we?

For me, my art does not come from the street. Although I decide not to scrape the contents of my bin onto the road, I do not have a large obsession with saving the world from plastic whicker snack trays. To be Frank, I don't give a Bob's arse about the planet. Nor do I wish to use up the very last drop of paint before starting a new tube. However, I must say do enjoy the feeling of history that can come from an old object. It leaves me to wonder what type of person may have previously owned the object and why. Occasionally I might collect and use old materials, or dirty burnt paper, but this is merely for effect. I love the feeling of layering papers together, or painting over many layers so that you can see each part. This a reason for my liking towards watercolours and ink. They can be as opaque or as transparent as I wish. I can build my layers as many times as I want, and over anything that I want. There are also many techniques involved with watercolours, which is something that I feel to have such flexibility is wonderful. Restrictions always annoy me. For me, freedom is the key to my art. If I wish to paint with mud, so be it. YOU wont be stopping me.

lifes a mistake, so draw it.

Today we had a lecture from a local artist Emma Mclellan, speaking about the progression of her artworks over time. She has always had a liking towards animals, and her earlier highschool works depicted animals with a perculiar human nature to them. She prefers to work with print media in a loose freeform style, and her works are often multilayered over canvas, paper or wood blocks. She does not like the strained cleanliness of traditional printmaking where you have many restrictions, need to be perfect, and imperfectionless. She prefers these imperfections, and mistakes.

I noticed that she had made many works titled with the name "chimera" in it. (chimera series II above) I decided then to research the name since I have never heard of it before, and found that this was the name of a great fire breathing, mythological creature. It too, like most of her works was made up of several different types of animals - lion headed, goats body, with a snakes behind. In animals, variation would be key to shaping and creating some of the worlds best creatures, even if not as extravagant as some of the worlds mythological wonders.

Emma's inspriration is mostly drawn from the intricate wallpaper designs of 17th century artist, William Morris. He works mostly with animals and nature, creating busy winding designs for a commercial use in furnature, curtains and wallpapers. Another inspiration point for her are the many bestiarie books where apon artists have tried to depict newley discovered animals with great difficulty, as the artist is often merely listening to the adventurer's descriptions. The depictions of the the animal itself would have become much more distorted, and more fantasy like as the artist would have never seen these amazing creatures themselfs. who knows? perhaps the adventurer was being a bit buff and made a few of the scariest ones up! Horses with long twisted horns, a rhinocerous with strange armour-like skin. They were playing god by creating all of these fantastical creatures. She enjoys these because they are not what they are supposed to be. They are not perfect, and much like her printing style, they have flaws.

Emma's idea is to take these old designs and strange drawings, re-print them, and make them her own. In doing so, she had used Photoshop to scan in and manipulate the beasts , creating strange new hybrids. She then used the print screen process to print her beasts and pieces of wallpaper over previously painted or sanded down surfaces. Like Morris, she also enjoyed printing on fabrics. Traditional printing requires you to take one large sweep, printing the entire image, however she does not print in such a way. she prefers to print small sections of the wallpaper over her work, making her prints irregular and imperfect. This links into her own ideas on life, that it is never perfect. there will always be a flaw within it. even our own brains are imperfect when it comes to remembering exactly what something looks like. The old bestiarie books may have looked rather different if our minds could imagine the perfect image of an animal and draw it just so. Luckilly todays screen printing process does not require the largest brain to duplicate images, however even so, there may still be a few mistakes.

This is a reason why she loves the manual techniques of printing. With the hand, your picture is open for so many man-made flaws. Off-set ink, wrong colourations, sizing difficulties. Imperfections that cannot always be helped. She also prefers not to have the restrications of traditional printmaking. Most techniques limit you to printing on paper. Screen printing hardly limits you at all, being able to print on plastic, fabric, glass ect. making the results of the print even more unpredictable. This is what can make a print so unique. Like life, her art will always vary, and change.