10 min crit on my work.

May: The shape of the sculpture is successful, it immediately appeals to you and makes you curious. You want to understand it and touch it.

Megan: It feels like you have added random objects, and these don't make sens in your sculpture. It distract us from the meaning of your work and it would be more comtemporary if you didn't have them, also the fairylights are in complete contradiction with your work (brutality). I like the black triangles, they are captivating and makes me want to know about the work, however it would be more successfull if these were more organised and they were more of them. You should also focus more on the journey and the fact that they discover themselves during the journey rather than the end point : "water". 

Isabel: I think you should consider your "hat" as a sculpture as well as a performance. I don't understand how the performance make your work stronger. It is interesting in itself.  

Charlie: The video is interesting but i think you should take your work furether by performing in the actual classroom and walk among us. You should be more considerate about the actual objects, and make some link. You shouldn't make your work to illustrative and talking about women in Africa is generalizing. When i first saw your work i felt connected to it, and i don't think you should create such a big distance by talking of another country which seems far from our culture/ and we don't relate to it. You should also work on your concept, the story is nice but what's the point of it are you trying to educate us on how lucky we are to have water? Are you trying to tell a story? Are you trying to show the distance some women from  and their poor conditions? How is this relevant to us , and what are you suggesting? Don't make your work too illustrative otherwise it looses it strength and our connection to it.

Jun Ho: I think you should make some connections between your video and the actual work, at the moment it feels disjointed.

Hampus: Look at artist William Copping, and how he integrates objects to his sculptures. 

How i'll use my feedback to make my concept evolve, and my idea

I'm interested by Megan critique: " your work should be more about the jouney and less on the end point". I looked then at my work from another angle, the journey to water is authentic , traditional and in our country we are lacking of authenticity, we are not true to ourselves, it's all about beeing politically correct, hiding your feelings (masking yourself) and change your identity to a certain conventionalism and code where you will feel accepted, you hide under so many layers that your actual personality rots (reference to that in the polyeurethane foam, looks like an illness and is bright orange: not normal). What if we do this journey (like a pilgrimage, a love journey a risk) and find our identity along the way, as the journey evolves, as our lives evolve, once we arrive to the water, to the final destination we are someone else, something else. 

During the crit, Charlie felt that my concept was not relevant to us as the culture is too distant and we cannot relate, I think that this new issue concerns everyone we all mask ourselves between clothes and a certain way of thinking, our society pressure pressures us to become like everyone, we are all the same, thinking the same, like robots.

At the end of the journey, you unravel your hat of all its materialistic aspects ( the  "uniform", blue jeans, white t shirt)  and your soul is free and sent to the water If I colour my hat in a neon orange, and send it to the water it becomes a buoy asking help to the countries who are authentic, to Africa to migrants. Migrants come here because they feel they will be helped but it is us who needs them to become who we are, our authentic selves. A desperate soul is thrown into the water, asking for help, there are too much suffering from this masquerade and it makes us unhappy. By doing this, I consider isabel crit,  my work is a sculpture as well as a performance, my work becomes an object in itself rather than a hat.

Feedbacks- public: I travelled with my work but covered it in a white cloth so it doesn't get damaged in the tube, I had interesting feedbacks. Everyone looked at me wondering what was inside this, someone even lifted the cloth to see what was underneath. This shows how we are intrigued by the difference and how we are not used to it because society pressures each individuals in beeing the same in the way we think, look, act...  Someone thought it was laundry and i felt judged because he looked at me like if I was mental. This is relevant to my work because it shows how people rejects difference even on the tube we all have to be "politically correct" and be "normal".

Photoshop has enabled me to learn how to present my work and edit my pictures for my portfolio.

Important to remember : 

- how to erase something distracting from your work

- how to move people

- How to select objects with the wand tool.

These will enable me to represent my work the best i possibly can.

Inspiration : From the lecture, I noticed several artists playing with the question "What is Art" (look research), Rosalind Krauss in the passage of modern sculpture talks about the struggle for the people of accepting modern art sculptures such as Carl André as Art. These questions have first been raised by Marcel Duchamp with his work the fountain.  

( Look Research Gilbert and George- Living sculptures)  Fascinated by the authenticity and traditions of African tribal cultures I started thinking that them carrying water and food on their head (journey) was an actual performance and sculpture. 

How can I relate this to our current society? 

I started experimenting with daily objects. And informed myself by reading articles on the fetching of water, I read this article about a mother of five children walking 3 kilometers to the well everyday to fetch water at the beggining of the day. My performance would be people experimenting a 300 meters journey with weight on their head (objects should fall along the journey )with water as the final destination.  I created a video at first where you can see me walking for 10 min with 30 kilos on my head, and how my body responds to it, shaking, sweating, readness,  things falling. This performance was important, I think it really showed the daily struggle these women experience, especially to me as I was the one performing and experiencing the struggle. Esthetically the video looked good, I wanted to be filmed only by one camera behind meand the person filming would be filming and following me. It was important to me that she would be walking too, because once people would see the video they would feel as if they followed me and experience the journey too. I walked for 10 minutes, and I did not want to edit these ten minutes into a shorter version, I also want my video to be silent. Watching someone walking for 10 minutes without any sound will get people "bored", it will seem like this video is never ending, and this is exactely what I want to demonstrate. "Time".

I wanted to make a connection between the video and real life, so i made a hat out of polyeurethene expanding foam. 

I struggled with the the foam as it was hard to create something in 3D, it kept falling appart. Also, someone wacked my sculpture by accident. I solved this by creating a shape with chicken wire and put my foam on top of it. I added sponges, ballons, washing gloves as a reminder of women daily chores and spraypainted it white. I chose each element by watching  my mother doing the daily chores for an hour. In an hour she used a sponge, washing gloves, she blew up baloons for my brother birthday party, she made pasta and therefore used a collinder and at last she use a dosage beaker to make the birthday cake. I felt that this thourough selection of objects would then hint my meaning: the weight on women shoulder. This was not sucessful, the objects looked random and it seemed that I was making a point on the environnement, the work reminded me of an Iceberg, or a block of ice with garbage stuck to it (pollution). I thought I could improve this, and convey my meaning by using white spray paint so the elements don't stand out as much, and then add african patterns. I chose, the colour white, because I wanted my work to be simple, as I wanted my idea to come through my work effectively. I believe that the simpler the work, the more effective the idea. Black and white are colours looking good together, simple, and a lot of african patterns were in these colours. However, the white spraypaint didn't stick on glossy surfaces such as the baloons and the washing gloves, as well as the collinder so I used acrylic paint instead.  As my work was three dimension and not flat, I couldn't do complicated patterns which i was originally thinking about as it was too difficult to draw or spraypaint (i cannot apply the stencil) (sketchbook), so I chose triangular patterns. This failed too, the work looked messy the black triangles were not structured and did not remind of the typical patterns as these are structured and gemotrical/symetric. It was important for me that the african culture/ traditions was hinted in my work because I wanted to raise awareness on some women poor conditions in Kenya, Ethiopia ... and to a certain extent the weight on all women shoulders today.

I was pleased with the outcome of the hat, the shape was as I wished, the expanding foam worked really well with my idea.  Although the shape of the hat was successful the colour white does not work, it would be more effective if colourful like Africans patterns, secondly the black triangles did not look good. And the fairy lights doesn't make sense, i added them randomly and for this reason it doesn't work. 

How can i overcome this?: I could change this by putting a cloth on and sculpting it onto the shape, or paint it in various colour. I am curious about the relationship of my objects and my work and I think that in the future I should make more connections between them and our current society. At the moment it feels like they have been randomly added to my sculpture when they are actually choosed to make a point. Maybe, my idea will come through when people will perform with my sculpture, wearing it on their head.

What will I develop in the Future? I will develop my concept so everyone feel concerned, it currently feels like i'm talking about an issue that concerns tribal cultures but are too distant from ours and people won't feel involved in my work.

I didn't want to work on something conventional, like a  piece of wood or a paper, i wanted to paint or draw on something 3D. So  i came up with this idea, food, and i wondered which aliment would be powerful: bread, apples, eggs? Bread because it is the basic food for the poor and the rich, during big crisis it was even the money, Eggs because it is the symbol of life (not yet existing) or apples because it holds a lot of meaning symbolically. Apples have are less fragile than eggs and have a matt surface unlike bread.  

Apples is the symbol of temptation (bible, snow white) and it is also something we eat all the time. So if i draw eyes on apples, it could mean various different things to the public such as the idea that you are watched doing anything for example eating an apple, secondly eyes are only for living creatures therefore  this apple alive and this way you can feel like Eve did, and you can be tempted by this "monster apple" and bite it. It could also mean our shared responsibility towards nature, drawing eyes onto apples makes us feel guilty as we "kill" something that is alive.

I want to cut halves and draw eyes on it, at first i wanted them to be white and my eyes black but when choosing the spraypaint in the artshop i loved the deep blue colour and chose to experiment with it. I liked the colour as it works well with the idea of temptation. Blue is also a very meaningful colour, it is the colour of the Virgin Mary, it is a pure colour so why not associate all this to create my piece, it could be a work on temptation. Human wanting to own the power, and biting the holy the sacred tempted by the eyes and by the flashy colours, it is also quite ironic as i want to make my work esthetically pleasing so people want to own it and to buy it, tempted.

Along the process i took photos, so i had traces of the evolution of my work. This is the only way anyone can know the process and the time it took, (look at Nigel Cook A new accursed art club) My work has switched from white to blue, to blue with traces of white, to eyes in black and white etc. until it arrives where I was guided.

The group crit helped me, we didn't have time to go through my artwork but I related to someone else's, the person created an architectural drawing with paint splatters, the tutor ask him to explain his work and he said the splatters were meant to represent spirits, ghost and shadows , however not everyone got this idea and thought differently. I was really interested by his idea and was glad to understand his work from his point of view, however I related differently to the work. I saw it more as a will to disrupt the perfect architectural drawing, showing maybe how anyone becomes crazy with a psychorigid attitude to life represented by the mathematical drawing.

This made me reflect on my own work, what if no one gets my idea and see it differently? What happens then, do I have the right to tell them and force them to see what i see? To tell them that their relation to my work is wrong? 

I chose to only suggest my idea, as i feel art is a domain where anyone has the right to feel a connection to an artwork in different ways, this means it is free of interpretation and my artwork belongs to the public therefore I don't have the right to guide their thinking and their beliefs. My idea is how i relate to the work of my own but this does not make it better than the others. It could be however that people want to reflect and wish to know my idea behind my work and not THE idea behind my work. Working with abstract is a choice over figurative descriptive work and choosing this method means you have to let go of your idea and instead listen to the public connection with your work.

My resources (newspaper, magazines) were limited, and unexciting. Glossy beaches, furnitures, and long texts were hard to work from however I solved this problem by cutting and collaging, as well as tracing. It was noticed that if you take parts of pictures and reassemble them you can create a whole different atmosphere, and a whole new idea. From this point of view, the transformation of my "glossy" resources became interesting, I liked the idea of transforming cliché magazines into a futuristic atmosphere. This effect was achieved by playing with fluorescent colours and by overlapping tracing paper, as well as associating things that don't make sense in order to create a story. For example, a Monkey and an aged man, or parts from the body such as one eye and one leg.

Experimenting without any ideas left me quite anxious at first, I lost control and started experimenting. This is a new approach to me because I usually start experimenting when I know more or less, where i'm going. (Look at Justin Mortimer, Karen Lynch- instagram leaf and petal design, Christopher Faust)

Sticking tracing paper onto a yellow background, experimenting with the transparence of the paper with glue, led me to experiment with fluorescent yellow paint and eyes drawn on a tracing paper. More and more, I focused on eyes, and decided to make a collage of eyes in a landscape, or a piece of furniture. Then my concept emerged, I chose to work with eyes as eyes watches, if surrounded by eyes like in the story of Caein and Abel anyone feels uncomfortable. This is how many feels in our current society, watched everywhere in every little thing they do.( Big brother) My thinking process helped me personally to figure out my outcome and I believe it is interesting to have an original idea behind my work. If i wanted to create many eyes i had to find a simpler way to draw them as i didn't have the luxury of time. I chose to draw them as children would do : drawing simply something as complicated (physically) but also as powerful as an eye. This contrast is actually very interesting for my work.  

At first i wanted my work to be glossy and minimalistic but i actually wanted to give a "skin" texture to my work, i felt this would be more effective and powerful, if my work was minimalistic my idea would not be conveyed, it would just be abstract. Wrinkled tape gives veins impressions. I loved Dieter Roth work Literaturwurst i thought it was very meaningful, and relevant to our theme, this inspired me in a way, I loved the concept and the effect of the newspaper and the sausage casing. This helped me figured out the medium i was going to use to give a wrinkled effect to my work

White Geometric forms with a "skin" and bruises on it, assembles to form one big rectangle.

This shows that white people assembles together rejecting differences even if it is just a few pigments different. White people group together in order to create something (here a rectangle but metaphorically a buisness, a community, a family, a society) and if they were more open to differences in general maybe they could create a whole new set of combination instead of the "formatted, mechanical, systematic" rectangle. I portrayed a black group as a small shape outside the rectangle, outside society, this is showing the rejection they must feel. You'll notice that this shape is different, it is dented, curved, square triangle, it is simply different and perhaps even more creative. It does not fit in the rectangle, it is litterally outside the box because we people put black in this situation or migrants. We do not give them a chance to fit into our society, we do not welcome them when they could make great assets to our world. Everyone has different talents and combined we could make something incredible. 

Inspired by the racist kellogs advert scandal from the newspaper, i wanted to create an artwork making people "metaphorically" understand how black people feels in our current society. Wood was a sensible materials as i want a perfect flat minimalist work. I wanted to make a 3D sculpture that would stand on its own and be around a 1,50 meter tall, I started and struggled taking the measurements it is something i'm not good at and it was difficult for me to visualise all the piece i needed in 3D. For example, a cube has got 6 Sides, so that means 6 squares however the cube will not be perfect if you don't count the width of the wood. Secondly, the workshops were closed on friday which means i didn't have any time to finalise my work, and had to find a simpler way to effectively convey my idea. I thought i would do it in 2D, meaning my work will lay on the floor or on the wall, this could be called a "happy" accident, as i understood my work was much more powerful on the floor. Why? It shows how this problem is ignored and people choose to believe it doesn't exist anymore, whereas actually it is all around us, in parties, conversations, adverts. People pretend it doesn't exist, and my work on the floor provokes the same reaction, people can walk on it. It is certainly not a conventional way of showing my work, every artists put their work on a pedestal or on the walls but no one would volontarily put a work on the floor because putting it on the floor devalues your work. People than "depreciate it" because it seems like you don't care what happens to it. There's racism everywhere but no one does anything, life goes on, people walk on my work and choose to not see it as a piece of art.

I thought of my concept first as i knew from the start that i wanted my video to actually be meaningful to those who watches it. I believe there are a lot of things in this world that are simply absurd and exist for no particular reason, things are done a certain way mechanically but no one can actually answer why they do it, what it means, why this way and not another way? No alternatives... I don't want my work to be like that, i don't want my video to be another consumerism advert or just esthetically pleasing.

With this in mind, and ready to type in my first idea for a video, i happened to be struck by a Lion King jumper advert. I thought that it was interesting, i liked the way this jumper made a connection between fiction and real world, it's true nowadays anyone make the separation between fiction and real life, but this jumper is a combination. And this is how i got my idea,it really taught me that an idea can emerge from anywhere.  Disney animated movies are considered exclusively for children and  we "divorce" with them at the age of 10-12 thinking that it is now time to "grow" up. I thought it would be interesting to show how they relate to our daily lives. It's true, every disney characters is inspired by human's action, every characters have great sins and we could actually learn a great deal from watching Pinnochio again. Maybe we relate to these fantasies in many more ways than it seems. It's not because they are cartoons that they  are for children. I then looked at Pierre Bismuth, the Jungle book project, Him too used a disney movie to communicate something about the world today, everyone speaking different languages. 

When i talked about the beggining of my idea in class and evocate the term " Disney" people immediately associated it with a joyful, stereotyped, cute, innocent video. But i they are far from beeing innocent, much more than just "cute". Secondly, Disney immediately reminds everyone of their childhood, because somehow it was linked to all of ours, and everyone recognise the sleeping beauty, or the lion king. I even asked people from another culture such as China if they recognised the disney movie i was showing  and they responded automatically. These figures are so mediatized and everyone knows them yet no one is still watching them at my age.

So i thought, why not show people what i see in them and make comparisons with Disney scenes and real life scenes and show how both are directly linked to each other. How meaningful disney and real life footages can be together.

To go even furether and make a point i'm going to choose iconic scenes from disney movies illustrating human basic sins, and while exploring sins why not take the 7 deadly sins. 

By deleting the actual soundtrack and adding instead dramatic sounds like heartbeats, thunder, fire crackling i successfully show that these sins lead to death, It is 7 way of dying differently and these are not fiction they exist in Disney as well as in real life. Then as sins evolve i wanted to make a political point and associate trump with Pinnochio. 

The crit was useful, people actually understood what i meant, they added that the screams at the end were a revolt against the world and meant "I can't take it anymore", this was interesting and helpful as it helped me add meaning to my work, originally it was another way of dying a scream due to torture and pain rather than an exasperation/frustration. I decide to make them go on once the screen is black so we start the same way we begin "pitch black" and a voice. Furethermore, i want these screams to go on quite long after the end of the video so people get frustrated and check how long there is left, I aim this to makes them feel anxious and annoyed and perhaps starts shouting too.

https://vimeo.com/242560377

Video making is something i'm not used to do and therefore it was challenging to find my way around the software, everything was new and remembering everything and how to apply those techniques to your video was not easy, especially as i felt people were getting the hang of it faster than me so the teacher adjusted his explanations to their pace as well, as a result i felt lost. Morover, i found hard to choose my video, we were told to use either youtube or prelinger videos but i felt useless in front of those website with infinites possibillities, because you can go into any direction with one of each videos. So i thought it would be best if i found first a concept or the beggining of an idea, this would lead my work to something, and i know that i can edit this piece or develop it. It gives a frame to my work, working with this approach helped me gain in time and productivity. I also thought that it would be best if i record, everytime my idea develops or changes in my sketchbook, and everytime i try something new on my movie. Screenshots from time to time will also help making a timeline of my work. 

The crit was productive today, i received feedbacks and unusual responses to my work.  As predicted, people were intrigued by my work but very few looked beyond, i should have perhaps offered a clue to the second reading of my work. Most of my feedback though confirmed that my intention was clear showing the contagious effect of a sneeze.

One student from my group suggested that a way to improve my work was by making it a performance, she said that what bothered her the most was the particules of water spraying onto a person when another one sneeze, for her it was a form invasion. Her suggestion was to have a system which when everytime a person sneeze in my video water was sprayed giving the impression of actual germs spreading. This would have made more impact as it would have directly involved the public with my work, going from a 2D work to a performance, making the audience part of my chain.  The class saw the germs on the tissue and thought of bacteria cultures, the fluorescent germs reminded them of a science fiction film and UV lights. I was advised to look at Karen Margolis works which involves bacterial experimentations on tissues. 

I challenged myself and stepped out of my comfort zone to make this fine art piece by adding a projection and a video, these are things i'm not usually experienced with and i had to learn how to make a mosaic video on a special software.

Interesting references will be remembered from the monday lecture. I was intrigued and inspired by the work of Taryn Simon "The innnocents". Photography is used as a tool to transform an innocent into a criminal, the photograph become a witness of the truth. Photography has both the ability to blur truth and fiction. I liked the way this collection of faces became meaningful together, these faces all have captivating features it is interesting to see that the photographer seems to have chosen persons who don't look innocent. He breaks down the clichés and i interpret his work as a message to us, "don't judge by the cover, innocent and criminals are not always what you expect to see". This work will definitely inspire me for my future projects. Furethermore, I found Dieter Roth collection "Flat waste" suprising and unusual, he had an interest in waste, objects that we throw away because we estimate that they've done their life, or that we don't care about. The way he represented his work in plastic sleeves was curious. It emphasises his interest in the waste, as organising each  waste into plastic sleeves takes time and also suggest that it is precious. He clearly did not want an aesthetic outcome as he did not organise his work on the wall. Also, the fact that he stored his collections into folders reminds us of archives, maybe he was taking records of human waste throughout the years.

Our first task was to group ourselves and empty our pockets and bags onto the table and classify our items from the most valuable to the least valuable. Interestingly our group decided that what holds the most value was water (survive) this was different to others definitions which was value as a cost. This created interesting debate, a person in my group thought that earphones were essential to live, she could not go through the day without music whereas i see them as plastic. 

My collection would be videos of people sneezing, a sneeze  it is a human reaction to get rid of the breathed bacterias  and mollecules such as dust. I found that the concept was interesting people sneeze to get rid of their bacteria, but a sneeze vehiculate theses germs to their surroundings, moreover i was interested by the fact that a sneeze is uncontrollable. When you think about it, people uncontrollably spread their own germs and noxious bacteria to their environnement, where people will catch their illness and the chain continues. One innocent uncontrolled sneeze could be the beggining of a long chain, and could at a certain rate infect our world. Through this idea i want people to reflect beyond the sneeze and think about the consequences of one action to the world, how one person can be responsible for mass destruction, nowadays with Trump or Kim Jong- un having nuclear bombs, we realize that if one decide to "sneeze" the world will suffer. This a metaphor we can reflect upon. Beside this idea, a sneeze reveals one's behaviour by the sound they make, or the way they cover their sneeze or not and it is interesting to notice the others reactions to a sneeze, most people push back instinctively and then say "Bless you", how ironic? 

I want my work to be read in several ways, and i will therefore not explain anything, i suspect people will not understand the link and the metaphor straight ahead or not at all and remain to the literal first degree and it is interesting as well. 

As i collected my sneezes i realised that it was difficult to obtain "natural sneezes", therefore i asked people to fake them, my work then takes another turn. I ask people to fake something natural and uncontrollable, i ask people to start a fake chain of contagious it becomes like a rumor someone spread, something fake that alarms everyone, like the news until . One of the sneezes in my entire work is a real, unprovoked one this could mean that at some point after spreading rumors their predictions and forecast will become true. 

I would like my videos to be displayed onto a grid representing the chain of people and once they sneeze they disappear representing the end of their lives. One will start sneezing and then contaminate everyone.

After collecting 15 videos we had to translate them into another medium i decided to draw the moment people sneezed, then i would tear each drawing appart and drop them onto a sheet of paper and leave them as they've been naturally, just like the sneezing process.

I decided that i would project my videos onto tissue paper sowed together, the idea is that once the person disappear from my video all you are left with, the only memory is a tissue paper with his germs on it. Their only identity left from this absurd world. This would work well with the projection as the tissue blurs the image so people are nothing but links of the chain with no power to control their actions as if they were automated.

Drawing in the morning from models dressed up, or beeing the model. Both enriching, i started drawing in several ways, sometimes with the models moving, pausing, with music these gave results that were unexpected, i noticed that the less i was thinking about the piece and the layout the better my work. At the beggining my work was horrible as i did not embrace the technique fully and i wanted to make a rational drawing with an irrational technique such as blind drawing. Even the failures though were captivating, for instance i blind drew a person wearing glasses, i noticed that the glasses were completely off the drawing and off scale but still the drawing was amusing and curious.

I wish i'd done better the collage drawing and gave more thoughts into making different textures or cutting things differently. Once it was my turn to model i learnt about negative spaces and how to make a posture involving most of them.

Combining all the work from this week into one result was intriguing, we had interesting discussion as a group. Some person see the outcome as a 2D whereas other as a 3D, so we thought that it would be interesting to combine both 2D and 3D: outfit and projections.  In order to be more efficient we split up into 3 groups, one in charge of the head others the rest of the body and a third group for the projection. I was in charge of the head, i thought i would make a mask with wire as wire linked nicely to  continuous line drawing, i therefore made a face with wire as if i drew it. Once we combined it all our pieces on the model we realized there was too much going on so we chose to take some parts of our work off and simplify other bits. This created interesting debates between us, argumenting which ones should remain and which one should go. For example some of our group thought we should remove the golden wristband but myself on the contrary thought that it added a nice effect and it was different to others work and differed from the simply white design.

Once exhibited we had various intriguing responses from the public, a majority of people thought our work was frightening due to the mask and the white mask. It remind them of the KKK, which was not intended at all, others saw it as a ghost. However someone had an usual response, the gold and the projections as well as the mask reminded him of a festive carnival ambiance , he advised us to add colours and to structure more our projection. This would improve the impact of our work. 

I enjoyed a work where Ting was taped to the wall dressed up and with drawings on her face and around her. She was used as a drawing model and i enjoyed looking at the differents observations, i thought that this work was fascinating in many ways. This group represented all areas and skills achieved this week rather well.

All of us had to bring 5 meaningful objects and create a sculpture. Luckily our group of five had very interesting and diverse objects, however they were all about the same size and i guess it would have been easier to have one bigger object in order to structure the others around it. This caused a problem because we felt we had to put everything and therefore we started to stack them on top of each other, or dropping it on the table without actually making anything of them, as a result our piece was disorganised and looked scattered! We chose then a few objects and tried again, we could clearly see that with less objects our structure came "alive". The drawings we made from it were really interesting as we mixed different rythms and mediums, we had for example a danish house with a dented roof, this brought an interesting feature to our drawings.

For the task "connect with yarn" we were inspired by Shiaru Shiota, we decided to hang all of our objects from a chair and create a "network of strings". I found that the work was interesting as a 3D piece however the drawings was not as interesting as you couldn't really distinguish the objects. It gave the impression of a messy scribble on my sketchbook, so this is one lesson i will remember: when you think 3D think about  your drawing as well and the results, often, you can make your observational drawing more interesting by changing the layout of the observation . 

I used my viewfinder to find different aspects of my drawings to make an outcome on the acetate. At first i was going to make an abstract structured illustration and started cutting out and attentively draw on my acetate. However, i quickly realized that experimenting gave far more interesting approach to my work, things that looked messy weird and discusting in real, once projected were actually really interesting and beautiful. A good example of that, is my experiment with glue and crumpled acetate, on the projector the worked looked rubish however the projection was very successful, the crumpled paper gave this filtered effect and added an attractive texture to my work. I decided then that i would experiment with all sorts of materials and create as much as outcomes as i could rather than focusing on one piece of acetate. As a result i had several outcomes which in my opinion were  pleasing. I would like to experiment with this technique for my future project as i thought it brings a lot to a project.

When asked to draw "man made structures", i did not see the relevance. Why drawing buildings when we were in fashion? I liked drawing metal sculptures and parts of the building made of horizontal and vertical lines, for example a staircases. I liked the fact that i was rushed due to the amount of drawings we had to produce so my perspective was wrong and a texture and a pattern came out of it. When observing and seeing the scene as spaces shapes, horizontal lines and vertical lines like the tutor and i discussed the work has a tendancy to become abstract and this aspect of my work interested me particularly. I tend to draw with pencil and beeing challenged by one of the tutor again helped me gain understanding that coulours and different mediums brings a different dynamic to your piece. 

Task after task i finally realised that our project was coming every time closer to something wearable. We had to select 5 shapes from our drawing that we drew separately, then we chose one of these shapes each (group of 6) and we created a "mosaic" with our skechbook. This was an interesting approach as you could see a print or a  pattern for an outfit coming through, with all our sketchbook together something definitely happened and worked. 

Creating a sculpture with 3 cutted shapes was something i found challenging as i kept seeing my work as "paper rubish" rather than a sculpture, i noticed with the tutors advice that the sculpture became more interesting if only the edge were joined and without overlapping. When we had to design our "sculpture" onto the body, i had the same problem. Again, my shapes were not visible, on my model you could only see bits of paper but nothing structured, this experimental approach frustrated me as i like things to be perfect and meaningful, however it taught me a lot: sometimes it is not all about the outcome but the approach or the drawings. 

The continuous line drawings we had to make in relation to the model were interesting, i could let go of my perfectionism and feel free to be as crazy and as abstract as i wished, this definitely enhanced my drawing skills even if it doesn't seem straightfoward. As i experimented with it again at home, i could see a different approach to my drawings and this technique challenged my "comfort zone" as i always used to draw things the same way without taking risks. I was pleasantly suprised by my outcome, i did not realise that such an experimental way of drawing could lead to a successful outcome.

The build it project changed my perception of architure and 3D design. Having little knowledge in spatial design and architecture i hang on the cliches such as: lots of maths, big scale buildings. This was wrong! 

With wooden sticks and masking tape we had the opportunity to create a shape, as a group we decided to do one simple shape and one more complex, a trigonomial cube to be precise. When we had to combine them we wanted to add the smaller and simpler shape to one side of the cube, as if the shape grew off it. 

Personally, i had several ideas of what our model could be, a building, a pavillion, a table.... 

Binding with another group and their whole other structure was hard. The group cohesion is not always easy as everyone have different ideas and viewpoints and not everyone has the opportunity to either speak up or work. Luckily we found a way to disscuss everyone's ideas. I realised it wouldn't be sensible to merge our structure by stacking them on top of each other or other methods. We therefore decided to build  a bridge between both going from one edge to the center of the other structure. When we were asked to add the paper we agreed that instead of putting drops and paper bits everywhere for the aesthetic, it would be much more interesting to focus it in one place, which in our case was the bridge. 

The day was very intensive, and i wished that we had more reflection time this would have made greater results but i guess the interesting part of the project was the fact that we had little time and this lead to a much more experimental approach. Giving feedbacks was something i found difficult, because i had lots of critics to make but everyone else was making kind comments which i thought were not helpful, this left me in a dilemma, should i make negatives critiscism when everyone else is ignoring the negatives and how should i approach them without hurting anyone's feelings.

Based on the design of Robin Day we had to create a seat more adapted  to the human body. First, the observation part: it enabled me to realize that everyone have a unique way of using the chair and different behaviours to it as well. Some use it the other way round, others lay and stretch on it... From my observation, no one was seen sitting straight legs joined. I thought that my project could be more adapted to these approaches. I had several ideas but i wanted my chair to be accesible to every kind of seating. I decided to make a  "retractable ladder" on top of the chair, this ladder could be used as a table, as a ladder, or as a stretching machine, you can even "isolate" yourself in this ladder.

The group criticism helped me to focus on the idea that was not my favorite, however i realized later that it had much more potential then the other ones wich were more basic and less creative. 

While exploring the three words " Suspend, surround and support" i realize i was drawn to the word suspend. 

Suspend has several meanings first of all you could associate this word with hang, something hanging from the ceiling, but there is also the suspension as in a punition. Those two definition were really interesting and i decided to create a design exploring both ideas. This idea came quickly however we needed to produce 30 in 5 minutes, this was a real struggle as i liked my concept and did not want to let go to find other possibilities. I learnt that if anyone wanted to succeed in the artworld they must have several ideas and alternatives to a project as tastes differ between the artist and the client. It is the artist's role to be creative! However the process of finding 30 different ideas taught me a lot, i realized that i overthink most of the time and sometimes a very quick and simple idea could lead to something even more interesting. 

When thinking of the term "suspended" (punishment) unconsciously i believe children are somewhat involved. Of course there are other kind such as prison or other kind of justice, and sexual punishment. Every human finds themselves "punished" as a consequence of their actions and choices. But i feel that children are a way to represent it or to represent us with bigger issues because it is when it all starts. Furethermore, this idea also comes with temptation, you are punished because you were tempted, and the temptation grew over your conscience and clouded your judgement. With this in mind i wanted to explore a naive childish "sin" : "Greed".

The work is a "frame" built with wire and a piece of the wire comes into your mouth "suspending" you from eating, bits of the frame are covered in string giving the effect of a spider web. The idea was that while the person wearing my project could see all the good food such as cakes and other, he/she was prevented from eating no matter how hungry. 

I was happy with my concept however i did not give enough thoughts into the material, as we had a short time to accomplish this work i went with the easier way wich was "wire",  we could only make use of the materials given to us which limited my idea. This was frustrating but most certainly enriching. The wire was not the best material as it was too tangible and did not give the strict and rigid frame i was hoping to illustrate my idea. If i had more time i would have come up with a better material, but without it we lacked experimentation time and had to go through with the original idea.  In my spare time, i'm going to redo the work with cardboard and tape, i would like to hang sweets and candies from it but it might look messy and distort the concept. I think that in my second trial my work will cover every part of the face exept from the nose enabling the person to only smell the delicious food.

This work and the examples in the presentation challenged my perception of jewellery. I used to think that jewellery consisted in rings, necklace and earings worn originally to highlight women features and were an object to look rich or important. Now i noticed, that not only jewellery concerns every part of the body but it can also be conceptual.

I chose to write "a wHOLE new world" inside a loo giving it a spinning effect. I wanted to portray this idea i used to have when i was a child with imagination that loo were a portal to another land. And i was fascinated by the flush taking fishes or my dolls to somewhere else. 

When people go to the loo, it is the one moment when they have their intimacy and they can cut themselves from the outside world, i wanted to explore this idea and emphasize the letters H-O-L-E of the word whole to have this playful approach, like a riddle you have to solve. I decided that i would take my riddle even furether by writing the words the opposite way, and have a mirror on the ceiling so my "whole new world" would in fact be destined to the dreamers or the depressed looking to the "sky" for answers! This means that people could ignore it or might not even see the meaning behind these words. 

The group crit helped me to realize that my initial idea was quite well thought however the final outcome was not as i hoped as the mirrored cardboard was not perfectly flat and not perfectly reflective, as a result it was hard to read, morover i  had issues hanging it to the ceiling. 

In the end, i'm going to improve this work by simplifying it and i won't do the mirror on the ceiling part as it is too complicated. I learnt that sometimes, you cannot be too ambitious about your work and you have to think about whether it is physically possible within the space.

One letter, and one illustration around it. This was a challenging task as we could only have one go because we only had one letter, this caused a problem for me as i like to experiment several ideas before choosing the one that works best. Therefore i believed that my work did not work as well as expected and i wish i did something else, and another illustration. My letter (N) was hard because it took up a big space of my page and it is a hard shape to work with and to transform it as an illustration, i thought more of the N as a letter than simply as a shape to work with.

At last, my stencil was not as elaborate as i wished it, I opted for a simple version thinking of the timespand, this was a mistake because i finished to early as a result when i could have made my work much more sophisticated. I didn't think well enough of the spaces and how to manage the void. When i looked at the  illustrations picked as examples i could see what made them different from mine and why my work was not as successfull, mainly because my work did not take the whole page into consideration and did not integrate the shape well enough in the page. 

The project poetic cardboard is an assemblage of an adjective and a noun. We had "Philosophical" and "Fabric". We thought first of philosophica, when are we philosophical? a place encouraging philosophical thoughts (ie. church, mind, in front of a beautiful scenery, conferences, alone), What makes you philosophical?An artwork, a quote, newspaper, shocking pictures reflecting on our society....

A fabric could be a tissue, but it could also be a structure, a material in general.

We chose photography as a medium to convey our idea. Cindy and I decided that we would like to explore a current society issue "the environnement". Today we live in a consumerism world, people are selfish and care about their race without thinking of the nature and the structure they live in. We put animals that lived long before us in danger through pollution and other harmful chemicals and we do that in order to create materials such plastic useful for toys,bags or metals to buy our next fashionable car. This vicious circle is simply ABSURD.  We were inspired by Dan toby Smith work for Craig Green, where he portrays refugees in plastic bags.

Through our work we wanted to "humanize" the plastic trash bag, making it alive and representing one day in its life. You can see that the plastic bag is taking the tube, walking, dying. We had several outcome of the uses of the plastic bag. We want people to think about our environnement, the way we treat objects that costs so much to nature (ie.pollution wise, time wise ). People basically put themselves in the plastic bag "shoes" and live as one to raise awareness to our current dilemma "the environnement".

I've learnt many things throughout this project, first of all to communicate an idea or a feeling you have to use drastic and simple method. This way the message will come out clearer and strike the person more. I still have in mind one artwork with a bread and a gun drawn with jam and the caption "don't spread violence". The materials were simple however the idea was clear and striking and it was very efficient.

I think our work was more poetic/ conceptual and fine art rather than communicating something directely to the public. I learnt that it was important to picture our work in the real world and not in a gallery, the use etc.

Are we really in control? What if a supernatural power designs our past present and future.

What if everything in the world has a spiritual essence? 

In this multisensory experience, you will drop into a seemingly empty void while laced to the ceiling. You have no control over what's happening, something greater will control your movements through strings. Once you fall into the holes, you will reach an elastic DNA fabric. It is a "living" lace, it will light up and a sound will come out. It is actually the sound of a "hang", an instrument. 

You will bounce less and less, and more and more you'll eperience the void until no light,no sound, nothing.

Once the experiment is over you'll realise that the pitch black room was only black for you as everyone could see you through a screen.

YOU'VE BEEN PLAYED!!! You were part of a puppet show.

Through this installations, human experience the treatement they apply themselves to animals whom they consider inferior.

The first task in groups was challenging for several reasons.

First of all, we didn't know each other, so by making decisions or choosing we did not want to hurt each other's feelings, it was therefore difficult to agree on an outcome.

Once we had received our process, our material and our "ism" we decided to put aside our "ism" first as we did know what it meant and we were unavailable to use the internet. Therefore we focused on the material and the process which were "hang and lace". These terms recalls severals ideas and visuals so each of us did a brainstorm that we put together at the end. 

During research in the library we individually searched for books that were interesting either by beeing radical and search for books related to the given terms or by already searching books that were in relation with our ideas. We looked at them together and took pictures that we shared. We agreed that for the next day we must have each at least one idea. 

On Thursday, we exchanged first and picked one idea we then managed to incorporate bits of each others. 

With this technique our work became surreal and original. To represent our idea we chose to make a 3D model (with nets, cardboards, strings), so our class could picture the scale and the effect of our work. 

For our presentation we made a script, that I read. This worked out well, because we added a soundtrack of the hang instrument while i was talking. This made people intrigued and caught their attention. Others in our classroom had other techniques, for instance a grouped popped a balloon, suddenly you could hear a fly.

Furethermore, we talked about the overall idea and the poetic side of our project before talking about the details which are less important, this was certainly helpful to our speech. 

This group project taught me a lot : the work itself was not challenging technically but i learned about interactions in groups, how to manage a group, how to agree, how to make a presentation and how to talk about your project in an interesting way. 

Breaking the ice on the first day by putting us into groups can be a struggle; Which questions should I ask? How to get personal and avoid the "small talk", and actually learn something about each others personality? 

At first, it was difficult to go in depth, as each individuals react differently to certain questions or attitudes therefore i believe that it is better to start smoothly however the "small talk" doesn't tell you much about each other characters. Our first activity was  to portray ourselves into one visual, it would have been better to have the courage to ask personal questions or at least have a balance. 

The second issue we had as a group of three, was to represent informations visually. I thought it would not be very interesting to represent things as they are, for example if someone liked "ice cream" or was from "China" represent the meaning behind it, or a certain attitude rather than simply drawing a Ben & Jerry's and a Flag.

Finally, we came together and represented a robot. It was called "connector", each of us drew what we felt represents us, i drew for example a river and connected our drawing to the robot through "wires". Poetically, it represents my character, as i'm easy going but i can switch moods easily like a river changes (current, weather...). 

This activity was overall very enriching, we did not have much time so we had to go to the essential which wasn't easy. I learned a lot about other's characters and strategies when looking at other's work or observing. I came out of my comfort zone when doing this exercise,  it didn't feel spuntaneous because we were "forced" to talk to each other.