Concertopia

My final material project is concertopia with Andre Stitt. ‘Concrete jungles’ or ‘urban monstrosities’ are some of the terms used to describe Britain’s new towns and city centres. Through photography and screen printing we will explore how abstract forms emerge through the experience of urban life and the built environment. This photographic material and personal experience gathered from an initial walking tour of Cardiff will be used to create prints that we will transform into models for a future utopian architecture. Conditional living environments, new towns, housing estates, and the architecture of civil and totalitarian conflict are merged, deconstructed, re-fabricated and evidenced through wall relief works and cast concrete memorials. These are examples of ‘new towns’ where this architecture exists;

Cwmbran, Wales.

These are the images I gathered from around Cardiff of this style of architecture;

I found these by using psychogeography, which is an approach to geography that emphasises playfulness and “drifting” around urban environments. It was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as “the study of the practice laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”

For this brief, we’ve made prints to go with our images of concrete buildings. I photoshopped four of my images to create this image below and then edited it to black and white to let my prints stand out more;

This is what came from them;

I really like how the block colours have accentuated the concrete block style of the buildings, however, only some of the textures and shapes came through. I worked with what I got out of the prints and made 3D pieces out of them;

I believe that the textures and block colours have helped make these buildings correspond well to this material project because it adds depth and even more dimension to the piece.