To begin looking at my current work in a more critical way I am going to briefly reflect back to level 5 to analyse how my recent works links back to then and also how it has moved on from that point.
In level 5 I was looking at the theme of the everyday. To respond to this is my work I made large scale, mainly charcoal, drawings of very ordinary objects. These objects included: water bottles, my bag, scissors, a ballpoint pen and my most used subject matter: keys. These drawings were done on large pieces of paper or wallpaper which I left unframed which I think added to the theme of the everyday. I also left the paper in the shape that I first cut it into before drawing onto them, even if the edges weren’t perfectly straight. This gave the pieces interesting over all shapes. It also meant that you could see how I was responding to the edge of the paper whilst drawing, I didn’t want to lose this by trimming it down.
By drawing these very normal objects large scale they suddenly became quite abnormal and interesting. Because of the scale it then forced the viewer to look at the objects, and see them in more detail to what they would be used to. I also presented these drawings along a corridor and so the viewer was very close to the pieces, not allowing them to step back. I was exploring the role of scale, the scale made the drawings quite powerful and would catch the audience’s eye, especially with the bold contrast of light and dark from the chalk and charcoal. I think the drawing which was most successful was of my keys. Keys are an object most people use day-to-day but never study closely. By drawing them multiple times I began to see lots of interesting shapes and shadows on the keys. All of the scratches on the keys and key rings could also tell a story as they are indexical traces.
An artist who I looked at as part of my studio practice and dissertation was Claes Oldenburg who I will go into more detail in my next blog post.
My current work in studio practice is also based on the everyday and so I have taken inspiration from my previous year at uni but changed the way I am portraying it. This semester I have begun using hand lettering as my main way to work. This includes screen prints, hand painted letters and hand written words. The words I am choosing to write all link to me in some way and are all very ordinary. I think it is more important to look at the letters as art pieces in their own right to what the words actually say. I don’t plan to make any political statements through my work, I am more interested in the form of lettering and documenting my life. My semester began with drawing into pizza boxes to do this and I then made pizza a big area of my work, I think I am now moving on from this idea although there will still be links to it throughout my practice. As an example my prints are in the shape of pizza boxes with hand lettered words in the middle, I have also printed onto a pizza box which looks really effective.
