Cross year Criticality
In semester two my first project was to experience a cross year criticality. This involved creating a new piece of work or adding to an existing piece and then exhibiting it with several other pieces from our tutor group and 2nd year students. The advantage of this being that the 2nd year students will give their thoughts and advice on your work and where to go next.
My idea was to take this opportunity to do something completely new to me, to create a sculpture. To gain inspiration I used my final piece from the first semester as a guide, To make this three dimensional I looked at the forms in my painting and realised that they're all created randomly, free flowing and organic. In response I saw that to make it 3D I would have to use a material that was easily flexible and that can retain it's shape, card was the perfect match. My method was to scrunch up the pieces and then to unravel them, then to paint them with the same pallet as the painting. After the first semester I had realised from the feedback that my work is more 3D than I thought. My lecturer described my technique of painting the sides of the canvas as different and that this made it more sculptural too. Due to this, my idea for the cross year crit was to experiment more with this idea of my work being sculptural. We were only notified a few days before the actual exhibiting of the pieces, so a searched different organic styles and materials that I could then take into my own. Through searching I couldn't find the right appearance, then I remembered that one of my old A level pieces actually included a great method that I could experiment with on a larger scale. My "Beast from the East" piece had a section of 3D canvas popping out in bold, geometric shapes that I then painted to resemble an ocean turning into ice. This method meant I had to paint in the highlights, shadows and tones to get the realistic effect.
The overall outcome of the pieces were great, but then I didn't know how to display them. My original idea was to suspend them on string, floating above one another. Then, by accident, I left them in a pile on the floor and stepped back to see that it gave off the illusion of one piece. Even though all the shadows didn't actually match up it still gave off the effect of hyper realism, as my tutor said when she first saw it. In fact the response was great, my tutor originally thought that it was just the natural light bouncing off the pieces, then when instructed to move it away from the window she realised that I has actually painted in the shadows and highlights. The feedback gave useful constructive criticism, such as making me question the reasons behind the original and then the transformation to the sculpture. I hadn't even thought about different areas and ways of displaying until Jai, Level six tutor, asked me to move it around and to separate the two pieces. This gave it a whole new look and meant that you could see it from all angles, new colours and forms were now visible. She then introduced sight lines into the room and how from one piece to the next that others were clashing or working well with their counterparts. Mine was now nicely framed though the scaffold sculpture, by second year Ian, as you entered the room to then follow the path down towards a more open space with my sculpture just offset from its original. A nice compliment off Jai said that she could imagine this in the Tate gallery. This made for a great success and now has led me to want to explore this method further for the forthcoming St Georges Hall exhibition.
In terms of other peoples work there, it was a great way to see new and developing pieces from my friends and others on the course that I hadn't seen their work explained before. It was especially useful to get an insight of what second year students experience and their practises. Next year when I am participating as a second year, I will how useful this experiment was for me and maybe how much it has developed my work by then.
