Monday, 29 April 2019

St George's Hall Exhibition


St George's Hall Exhibition

Now on the last few days before the exhibition I was painting pieces for the installation like crazy. Having two other pieces for the show i felt more at ease, but not knowing if the main piece was going to work was stressful. installing the other pieces was simple and they sat with their surroundings well.

The Sea Goddess of St George's Hall


This piece turned out well for it being from the workshops. Using all my experiments I was able to frame them as a collection, and even though it wasn't their intended purpose it still turned out well. The placement of them next to my other piece and settled with some ruins of the tunnels showed a big contrast from a normal gallery wall that it would usually hang from. I like how this related back to my normal style and proved to me that i could still come up with these characters from just a building's history.

Ancient Pottery
























Inspired by the floor from the Great Hall, I was committed to the theme of sea mythology and found that there was a ceramic plate created and designed with the floor's features to show the same story. Called "Magnificent Majorca", it inspired me to do my own pottery collection, but as if it was from the same times as the gods themselves. Working with pieces I found in a charity shop that reminded me of waves, I transformed them into relic by dabbing acrylic paints and layering them till they looked aged and cracked. This method worked well and changed them completely. I painted a design around the both of them with a crashing wave against rocks. I believe now if i was to do it again I would add a depiction of St Georges Hall to tie it in more. In it's place around the ruins, it blended in perfectly and worked much better than I initially believed it would. I am going to work with disused objects again in the future because it seems to be a common theme in the artists' works I like at the moment.

Failure & Solutions

Now that my other pieces were set up and ready it was time to start installing the main piece. This was already a huge worry for me as i had no clue if it was going to work. Sadly after many attempts of layering and sticking to the wall, nothing was working due to the dust and lose brick work of the arch. with only a day left I had to think fast and I remembered on the site visit that the first space I saw was a disused staircase which took the old prisoners to their cells. It was perfectly lit for the shadows of my piece and meant they only had to be placed there and not stuck. However, it was a lot bigger than just the one small wall of the arch. Up all night painting more sheets for the piece, it all came down to how it will look now flowing down instead of a wave upwards. This reminded me of the Weeping window piece that toured the country resembling the memory of those lost in way and when it came to Liverpool it was constructed as a waterfall cascading down the hall and this was now my aim of impact for my won piece. spending hours placing them in different places and standing back to review, i finally came to a point that was finished and gave off the look i was after. in fact this place was much better for the piece and gave it a viewing platform. Learning from the stress, I know that for the next show it will be okay if something goes wrong and seeing all the positive reactions towards it from the public meant it was all worth it. never having any of my work in a huge institution or historical monument like this was a big jump from just doing art as a hobby. I am looking forward to where my work could end up.

Waterfall  








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