Project summary

I believe that this project has been hugely successful and I really enjoyed the entire process. We’ve successfully completed a ‘Bryan Wynter’ box and over twenty different slides together, as well as a variety of different hanging pieces. I was initially unsure about working very precisely and having to measure and plan things out because I’m never inclined to do so with my own work. However, I found that I did enjoy the process and that the finishing outcome of what we made looked very professional. I started my thought process to get ideas by looking at artists, mostly Howard Hodgkin and his work “After Visiting David Hockney” (First Version), 1991, because his work is totally expressionistic and relational. I was really interested in how he created depth in his work, while only using flat surfaces, therefore I decided to play on this idea during this project. I also wanted to use colour in an interesting way, therefore I also researched into Frank Stella, and his piece ‘Hyena Stomp’, 1962. He’s used contrasting colours that aren’t completely aligned, further contrasting using the lines and pattern, something I enjoyed experimenting with during this project.

This project also unexpectedly made me realise what I really enjoyed about working with colour and shapes, which was the optical illusion aspect of it. I further researched into artists who made work around this, such as Oleg Shupliak, whom I’ve never come across before, although could really help me in my subject work, as I like working around metaphors and political issues. Using illusions could definitely help me convey my ideas interestingly, and help it be not quite as obvious as I had previously been working. I printed on fabric and made prints to convey all of these ideas in a workshop, and I decided to make as much work possible to be able to have a huge variety of pieces to use for the slides in the box.

All three of us had been working independently at this point which was great because we all created a large amount of work that were all very different to one another. This meant that we had to figure out how to make our work ‘work’ together, which lead to narrowing a lot of our work down. This worked really well because we all had an equal amount of work put into the slides and they were all efficiently working alongside each other, proving how efficiently we were communicating and working together, making the entire project work smoothly. I also believe that I’ve never had such a successful outcome while working as a group, and I’ve initially always tried my best working independently because of previous failures. However, working with this group has made me want to carry on working with others, and perhaps even work collaboratively in my subject area with people who work similarly and differently to me, as group work seems a lot less challenging after this project.

I will definitely carry on with working with colour and bring many ideas that I’ve gathered from this project to my own work. The use of colour was never important to me before this project, therefore being able to use it primarily to create the overall effect has really opened my eyes to using it carefully. This will further add to using a more abstract approach to my future work, such as the optical illusion aspect that I really enjoyed.

Overall, I had an amazing time during this project and I learned a lot of new skills, for example, the fabric printing and lazer cutting, as well as develop old ones that will be very useful to my future work, such as working collaboratively to create exciting pieces of work.