I’ve now had over a week to reflect on two recent exhibitions, and Wednesday’s Air Open Dialogues event in Nottingham gave me an opportunity to discuss the thought processes that I have gone through more recently with the group of people there.
When I graduated and started this blog I was keen to move in a new direction with my work, and was trying to initiate a doll-themed body of work. However, more recent exhibitions were suited to revisiting The Unreal God theme again to explore how that works in different contexts.
Maybe it’s my illustrator’s mindset that makes me work towards creating a definitive work that has a deadline, and then move onto something else. I don’t always think the same way as other artists do, or even other illustrators, because as soon as I start to think of myself as an illustrator, I will immediately come up with something more conceptual in contrast to that.
In any case, it was good to be able to share a discourse with others, both Lizzy and I gained a lot from it, it was nice to meet fellow bloggers – I found Andrew’s insights resonated for a lot of people, and of course it was good to receive some positive feedback, especially with regards to how I’ve set up the LAN.
It’s good to see that others recognise that as the achievement that it is, especially considering that I have so many plans both for my own practice and for the group that it’s easy for me to think that I’ve only just started and haven’t achieved anywhere near my overall goals for any of it!!
I feel that my thought processes have now solidified into a definite course of action for the time being, and for the body of work I wish to create as part of my residency. The dolls will have to wait now, as further discussions with the animation dept have cemented the idea to focus on an animation that merges Take On Me with Alice In Wonderland. I feel that to try to animate dolls at this stage is far too complex, or even to combine dolls with animation, and I’ve taken a step back and decided to work towards following on previous work because it’s now timely to do so – next year is A-ha’s 25th anniversary of Take On Me and the band are retiring.
I want to explore the juxtaposition of Take On Me with Alice In Wonderland in the form of an illustrated Take On Me animation but without so much dolls.
This will enable me to work on a small side project alongside this.
