The University of Bolton.

I have been tinkering with an idea for the title for our collective collaboration with Bolton Museum and Art gallery…

“Incahoot ” all one word…

I also had a go in photoshop playing with some ideas I have for the publicity material, I quiet liked the randomness of the images in front of the Bolton civic centre which houses the museum.

Now I’ll have to see what the rest of the group think to my suggestions!

We had an interesting and informative workshop this week hosted by Rebecca on the techniques of etching. having no experience of the process I was really interested to learn how to do it!

I soon realised once Rebecca started talking us through the process, there is a lot of time and patience involved, however I can imagine it being a quiet relaxing and almost meditative process once you got into it. Considering we only had 3 hours I would say we did well to understand the basics, although it was a shame we couldn’t get further, there I have to learn to be more patient I suppose!

So… We brought our hard waxed plates home to work on, kindly, Val gave me her plate as she didn’t intend to take it further. I wanted to do an image of my head to use in this semesters work, just to try the process and hopefully get something I can use in my assessment. As I had two plates I decided to go “off piste” so to speak and use the second one for purely decorative effect and to have a little experiment! I found an image which was in my photo’s of a detail of my garden railings and used this to make a sketch into the wax… I decided to use a more painterly effect by applying some turps to the wax and letting the wax melt a little freely, anyway it will be interesting to see how they both turn out. The next question is when am I going to get time to develop them to the next stage? Its the Easter break next week, so it will have to be after that…

It has to be reflected on, it’s something which has been bothering me rather a lot lately and yes, it’s all because I have been neglecting to blog.

It was extremely difficult to write, concentrate and reflect on what my intentions were this semester all down to the distraction of moving house. I seem to have under estimated the time, energy and sheer frustration it can and has caused!

I know it shouldn’t be an excuse, but I am able to recognise it has had a negative impact on this semesters in put from me.

So… time to make up for the short fall, I think it’ll be a difficult task to fill in all the blanks so I’ll start on my more recent developments.

This semester work is largely based on identity… I felt as a continuation from my work last semester I should use and run with the theme, I touched on the fragility and vulnerability of the human condition through a lot of experimentation with materials last term. This term I wanted to start with a strong idea, do less experimentation with materials and explore the representation of identity or in this case the complex, multiple and fractured identity many of us have to juggle with in our everyday lives. My starting point was a full head cast, this time I’m not using my own face or head, I wanted this to be a subjective offering and not so much an intrinsic experience, I felt it maybe mis-interpreted as a biographical piece if it was another cast of me!! or even worse I might get the reputation of being self obsessed. So, I borrowed a cast from the special effects department, a man, who I’ll christen “Dave”… I have no idea who this cast is of, which is a bit of a paradox as my work is about identity.

Taking inspiration from Eduardo Poalozzi’s heads, segmented and fractured to form abstract shapes but still retain the form of a human head…

I intend to cut the head into sections and manipulate them to create a fragmented representation of the human head…

These images are of the first head I did today, nothing is fixed at this point as I’m still trying out different arrangements.