17 Jan 2013 A New Year A New Post

I have finally got around to updating this blog, It was meant to be done in December but I have had so much on. Well here goes.....

I started off the last semester with a project that I had been working on over the summer as you can see in past posts and when it was complete I realised that I was not happy with that. The piece was not working for what I had envisaged and I thought that it may have been a little to obvious and twee. I did however tweak the final part of it and removed The lettering that looked a little too craft orientated.

But moving on from that piece and with the same concepts in tow I started on a piece that was going to be hidden within a wall based box. The word ULTRAVIOLENT was going to be lit with ultraviolet lighting and illuminated from within the box, the idea is when someone passes the box on first glance their perception is they are seeing the word ULTRAVIOLET because of the light and because we do not always pay attention to text when walking about, especially in a gallery space. The message really is to look a little harder and see what is on the inside and never judge by what you presume you are visualising as 90% of the time your perceptions are misleading. The key theme I was deriving my work from would have to be a from a collection of words, 'Explicit', 'Implicit', 'Perception' and 'Ambiguity'.

Once I had made the original box I realised that I wanted the effect to be bigger, I wanted the viewer to have work at looking into the box. I decided to make the box 3 times the original size and have it floor based, this gave me a greater effect but also allowed me to take the sculpture away from the gallery wall space and bring the floor space into play. 

Whilst working on the above sculpture I decided that a statement on the wall could also be imposing if placed correctly, I cut and carved letters in Algerian type font and made the sentence 'whatever makes you ashamed and why?'. The sentence is meant to be viewed from a certain angle and change as the room is lit differently and how the natural light changes and as the viewer walks around the gallery space.

The words and sentence changes 'whatever makes you ashamed and why', 'whatever makes you asham and why?, 'what a sham' and 'what a shame'. The effects of the black lighting really bring the words into the space and relinquish the rest of the sentence as that has become  peripheral to the illuminated text. the wall seems to absorb the text and you really have to work hard to view it under the U.V lighting.

I continued experimenting with the use of lighting and I had been writing a poem about our place in the world after reading Liliane Lijn's book 'Crossing Map'... it inspired me to create a sculpture that incorporated a small part of the poem of realisation. I still wanted a certain ambiguity within the work and did not want the words to just stand out and be easily read. The section of poem was divided into four sections to enable me to manipulate where they were placed and really to allow my work to be removed from the normal gallery space and perhaps work outside. 

We are now in our final leg of our degree and the dissertation is under way. . . . more on that later..

Back to Uni on Monday so it will be great to see everyone again and see what the final semester has in store for me.

AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!