Material Projects and what I learnt from them.

I participated in the material projects Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, September, Concertopia and Shaped Paintings. They all offered very different skills and ideas, all of which I’ve used since in one way or another.

My first material project was Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, September and I learned about print making and the different sort of printmaking I could make, and quickly, which will be tremendously useful for planning and sketchbook work I’ll be doing in the future. I also learned about monoprints, however I didn’t get a chance to try it out but I’ll certainly include them in my work for Inside/Outisde because the effect is very aesthetically pleasing as well as it having a powerful potential. I also found out about the artist John Stezaker who uses landscapes as well as photography in his work, which are beautiful and powerful by usually being two romantic, but totally different, images emerged together; a process so simple yet very inspiring.

For Concertopia, the most useful tool I gained from it was using psychogeography, which is an approach to geography that emphasises playfulness and “drifting” around urban environments to find interesting objects, which could potentially be very useful for my work. I’m definitely looking into using photography because I finally got to use photoshop and it turned out well. I’ve also been looking into artists who use photography, such as John Coplans who uses many black and white photography of himself, and I’m very interested in the effect they can have, especially when using photoshop to amplify the effect.

The one I enjoyed most was Shaped Paintings because it attracts me to make something from scratch in the way you make a shaped painting. It’s never a blank canvas because it’s already a piece once you’ve cut out the shape(s) and it could still turn out completely different to your first idea. They can also be incredibly powerful to use for art pieces because they make such strong statements from being a shape, rather than a rectangle shape, which is very useful for my political pieces and a useful thing for me to have learnt from this project. This project also lead me to many feminist artists that I’m still currently, such as Dotty Attie and Ilona Granet, who use materials from text to detailed paintings, giving me a huge variety of ideas to play with for my Inside/Outside project.