Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Tough Art


For once I am feeling like I am on track with my writing - until my fiction tutorial tomorrow of course, which could change everything. Today though it is my visual practice that I am struggling with. I have lots of ideas which I have been following up on - but none of them are quite working in the way that I want them too. That is all part and parcel of the process with art I know, but I have two week until my deadline and I feel like I haven't done a strong enough piece of work yet. It's very frustrating, I had hoped that I would be able to produce something that I was at least marginally happy with. I want my work to be meaningful and aesthetically pleasing but I feel like I have veered of at a tangent, gone off track.

I started by looking at the layers within society and family, starting with the self and fanning out - self, immediate family, wider family, community, area, country, world. I decided to focus on the family, especially the dysfunctional family, I have mad two and three dimensional collage and had started putting image and text onto household objects using lazertran and letracet. I wanted to use comforting and famiiar crockery to convey a deeper message using family pictures and darker text that normally would not go with them. That led me to look at the way certain household objects are used in a less desirable way. For instance wooden spoons are generally used for coooking and baking but it is amazing how many people have said to me that one or other used them for administering corporal punishment. This gave me the idea of putting text onto the spoons and pictures - unfortunately though the pictures don't quite seem to work. I also need a way to display them. I thought that I would hang them up but haven't been able to come up with the right thing to hang them on. Any ideas ir thoughts gratefully received!

6 comments:

theprovocativecynic said...

String 'em up like an Alexander Calder-type mobile?

Julia said...

thanks - yes stringing em up was what i thought I would do - is his stuff on wire?

Anvilcloud said...
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Anvilcloud said...

Here's a page of Alexander Calder search results.

theprovocativecynic said...

Anvilcloud seems to have come to the rescue with his Calder link. The mobiles are enormous and made of fine bent metal rather than wire - they are quite something. Alternatively you could have a look at the site for the SCVA exhibition a couple of years ago at http://www.visitingarts.org.uk/features/v45ts.html
I don't know if you saw it, but the scale of the hanging exhibits was amazing.

Julia said...

thanks for the advice evryone!