University Campus Suffolk

If you’re having girl problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but the bitch ain’t one, hit me!!!

What the FUCK!!!

Not a typo

Do you ever see something that you think, hmmmmmmm, that just cannot be right, and carry on walking the direction you were going in, only to then stop dead and turn around to view it again just to make sure you saw it right or you find yourself doing a lap of whatever space you are in just to return at the point where you thought ‘hmmmmmmmm, that just can’t be right’???

Well that was the situation I was greeted with this morning, I chose the second option, with a quick lap around the town centre to get back to my thought provoking vision… LUSH shopfront. It would appear that LUSH, as well as making rather overpriced cosmetics, although it appears they can get away with this as they do state that they are ‘handmade’, have become somewhat of a political influential power on the face of this planet, who’d have thunk it???

Am I the only one who is disturbed by this?? Or the only one to find this remotely inappropriate??

In 2012 they did a similar shop front display in a fight against animal testing, asking their customers to sign their shop window as a petition for the banning of animal testing in cosmetics, as well as performances by artists in the windows of their flagship stores. Again, I find it very strange that suddenly they have to have such a political opinion on a subject that essentially their business was born upon. There would be no LUSH if they hadn’t learnt from previous animal testing research, the whole cosmetics industry was born on early tests to see what was safe for humans and what wasn’t. I get that it isn’t the practice now and I am not saying I am PRO animal testing, I am saying however that animal testing is part of the cosmetic industry history, LUSH has skimmed over this key point and jumped on board a train that is running rather behind schedule, this country has not given out an animal testing licence since 1998, which I know doesn’t mean that it has completely been eradicated but it does mean that this country has done what it can to reduce the legal testing on animals for cosmetic purposes. And then it is forgotten… a month after the window petition started, the chalk marker was wiped from the windows, the POS stands were thrown away and the staff carried on with their minimum wage job, selling unreasonably priced soap.

Really, was this just a publicity stunt for advertising and promotion??

Anywhoooooo

Back to the present day protest…

LUSH appears to want us to jump on board with their campaign to stop drone attacks… I fear this must affect them in some way, I just don’t appear to know in what way!!!

Oh yeah, that’s right, it affects them the same way it did for their animal testing campaign, it allows them to gain Publicity, Promotion, Advertising and appear to be a caring business. They have a page on their website dedicated to this cause, explaining about their collaboration with the Human Rights charity Reprieve and then shamelessly selling products based around drone attacks. I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m not meant to, maybe I’m not seeing the point and I am just being a grumpy, unsupportive human. But I fail to see how anyone stepping in to LUSH to specifically buy one of these charity products will not be approached by a sales advisor and convinced to purchase other LUSH products. For me it seems a shameless act of publicity.

Once the promotion has run its course, just like the Animal Testing, apart from a trace on its website, it will be gone, Sale assistants will clear the windows, POS will be destroyed and profits will be up.

That is all…

Referring back to a previous entry talking about concrete, I have made the trophy mounts for the cameras out of concrete. To do this I firstly made a mould on the vacuum former, using wood to make the original die and then vac forming over this, I made several different shapes and sizes in order to get a variety of trophy mounts sizes. I then filled these moulds with a concrete mix, and left them to go off. Once set I am left with solid lumps of moulded concrete that I carefully drill into to create the holes for the plugs that will hold both the camera on the front and the mirror plate that will be used for hanging.

The second body of work I am displaying for my degree show is a wall of mounted CCTV cameras. The idea developed from my previous idea of mounting conversations or speech, my piece ‘Glow’ is an example of this…

We are living in an age of ever increasing surveillance; CCTV cameras are a very common vision on the streets, to quote government statistics ‘each person in the country is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily’, Daily Mail, 2009, Revealed: Big Brother Britain has more CCTV cameras than China, [online], accessed 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205607/Shock-figures-reveal-Britain-CCTV-camera-14-people–China.html#ixzz2UD3rseLP.

So what I wanted to do was to create a body of work that addressed this issue, I wanted to give the power back to the people, taking away the threat of being caught on camera. I chose to do this by creating a series which I loosely titled ‘Urban Hunting’. The series of work is based around the idea of big game hunting, as we are captured by the cameras, what would happen if the hunters became the hunted? Ripping them from their natural environment and displaying them as trophies on a wall for all to marvel at, they suddenly become less of an object of hate and more an object of desire. You want to display these as you have worked hard capturing them.

And all the friends lay down the flowers, sit on the banks and drink for hours, talk of the way they saw him last, local boy in the photograph…

On Sunday 14th April 2013 I headed down to Brighton to meet my very talented and motivated girlfriend Kate who was travelling down from Hull to take part in the Brighton Marathon… Here’s the plug: She is celebrating turning 30 by taking part in 30 sporting events for 30 different charities over the next year, hoping to raise £30,000 (£1000 for each), she has named this event Project30 and I urge you good good people reading this to give her Facebook page a look or her just giving page, just look up Project30 and it will come up, it’s for some really great charities… Plug over!!!

Brighton is a place of wonder, I have been before but years ago, I very much enjoyed my time there, but as with many tourist driven coastal towns, as well as great scenery and fun times AND Jamie’s Italian, which was Totes Amazeballs (been trying to get that new addition to the English language in for ages), there is also a large community of homeless folks, trying their luck with a tourist hotspot in a hope of making a little bit of money to feed themselves and perhaps find shelter for the night. With suck a huge event like the Brighton Marathon you would like to think that with the revenue it brings in to the local community they would distribute this to local homeless charities and shelters, I know I certainly tried to do my bit for the homeless whilst I was visiting Brighton.

Jane, I realize this has nothing to do with art but I thought why not give it a mention as my work is politically fuelled and I feels this falls under that category.

Anyway… whilst walking through the Lanes of Brighton, I happened to come across a little boutique shop, their main supplier seemed to be Vivian Westwood, so of course it had a very quirky window display. The photo here reminded me of my cones and bollards that I have made, replacing the models head with a camera had made the dummy an object of surveillance, I have spent the past few months sourcing ‘dummy cameras’ for my work and here was and entire shop window made up of ‘Dummy Cameras’. What I can take from this is future possibilities for using cameras within my practice and exploring surveillance within a completely new environment. It reminds me of the droids from Star Wars – The Clone Wars, you can imagine these mannequins walking around recording your actions and every move, perhaps this is an insight into how the government plans to move forward with future surveillance in our Big Brother generation.

It’s a crazy situation, but all I need are cigarettes and alcohol.

Today I have ordered a load of photos from Snapfish, against popular belief I have kept records, in the form of photographs, of all the work I have been doing within my studio space. The photos will be used to assemble a photo sketchbook that I will write notes in explaining every stage of my thought and making processes. I don’t really keep sketchbooks, I know this is something that shocks and appals the members of the art world, maybe one day I will change my practice, but when I get an idea I tend to make it straight away, whether it’s in mock up form or complete form. Yes I do end up with a hell of a lot of models or completed works lying around but I have a tendency, you may have noticed, of leaving things to the last minute, so if I gave all my time to sketchbook work then I don’t think I would ever have anything made. I do however acknowledge the use of a sketchbook for jotting down and exploring ideas, I just tend not to use it.

Is this wrong of me?

Should I be exploring all possibilities in some form of a document in order to get to a final product or does trial and error work just as well?

I don’t feel it hiders my practice, I went for years jotting notes and keeping sketchbooks and in the end I was just left with a book of confusion with hardly none of what I had written or drawn actually making it to see the light of day, at least with thinking and doing I am exploring the creation of work physically, taking problems on as they arise and creating works one after another instead of locking them away in the form of a doodle.