Tuesday, 5 November 2019

Wednesday Visitors - John Barker & Ines Doujak


John Barker & Ines Doujak

Collaboratively these two artists have worked together to produce political artwork that looks at the economy, society and hierarchy. One of their projects took the form of 48 posters using the old method of weaving art that then involved a dying process and a lot of manual labour to produce small amounts of work. The given nicknames for those dyes were then the titles of each piece. These pieces all had several different meanings ranging from research into class struggles at the time and the feminist movement which I find to be an interesting topic to base work off as it is still unequal and has many factors like pay gaps, abuse, and double standards to address though imagery that helps people to relate to it and to possibly gain awareness of a situation they or others are in. One titled "dye Spy" showed Britain's key part in the dye trade and how after WW1 USA and Germany had competition in this new found industry. Many of these had meanings but I didn't feel connected to these as they had been done so many times before or they didn't stand out as original and impactful, aside from this visually many I liked due to their graphical appeal like these below with the layering. 

  
Related image

In terms of my own practise their methods are similar to mine as they have connected their work back to historical connections in this case through imperialism and textiles. From this i may experiment with text on my own work as sometimes it ranges into the style of graphics. This is the main reason why I am moving away from painting and canvases because they make my work more two dimensional and in my mind, not impressive enough. My practise is taking a development and changing, but as Barker and Doujak explained in this lecture it is only natural for this to happen, but with the same elements from your practise before. For me I still have the same thought process as before whereby I base my pieces off of history or places but now its turning more to my interest of set deign and more theatrical which I see as a good connection and development in my work.

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