Workshops

Casting

Display

Make or design something which unfolds, opens out,or spreads out.

ISAAC SALAZAR 

Isaac Salazar creates three-dimensional works of art out of recycled books. The artist carefully folds each
page to resemble symbols and words. 

"My inspiration comes from multiple things and places. I can browse the used book section for titles that stand out to me. For example the recycle symbol was created on a book titled "A World with out Trees". 

Image

Photograph 100 pieces of chewing gum, display them in a way that removes them from their original setting and re arranges them by form, relationship or something else.


BEN WILSON

Many streets in England have been littered with chewing gum stuck to pavements, leaving it awful to look at and clean up and Britain spends £150 million annually cleaning chewing gum from pavement.

Ben Wilson started experimenting with occasional chewing-gum paintings in 1998, and in October 2004 began doing them full time. He has created more than 10,000 of these works on pavements all over the UK and parts of Europe. Wilson transforms gum that everyday people leave behind on the streets in to art.

He scours the streets looking for nothing but gum which is obviously old, he then heats it up with a burner and lacquers it which hardens the gum and creates a surface which he can paint on with acrylic paint, and he then adds another layer of lacquer on top of the paint. Applying this to the gum beforehand allows it to stay on longer and become a permanent street presence.

STEPHEN GILL

Stephen Gill is a British photographer and after looking at his work there was one piece in particular that I liked called a series of disappointments.

In this piece he used many betting slips, scrunched and twisted to from many shapes. 

"Each of these papers began as hope, were shaped by loss or defeat, and then cast aside. These new forms perhaps now possess a state of mind, shaped by nervous tension and grief. After these images were made, little autopsies were performed on the papers to reveal failed bets held within."

I love the simplicity if these photos and how each is photographed in the same way with the same background.even though the photographers are simple there is a lot of meaning behind them.

Context

'A small print on a mailbox becomes something really precious when you remove all the noise around it and isolate it from it's setting.' ( Merel Karhof, Project two). Explore familiar or alien surroundings by isolating, documenting and displaying anything you think will create a new awareness of the landscape.


For this project I decided to look at shadows around Bournville, the different shapes they cast and how they change and move as time goes by. I started by tracing shadows that had been cast on the ground  e.g. bins, trees, gates, buildings. After doing these I decided I wanted to trace then on a bigger scale as they were too small and I wanted a larger impact to be made, so i traced a shadow of a large tree.
I wanted to take them from there original place and put them in a different setting, which is why a placed the large shadow of the tree in the middle of the room on the floor. This meant that people could either walk around it or over it which would make it feel as if it was real shadow cast.

I chose to continue this project from the field guide and take it further.




MICHAEL NEFF

Michael Neff, a NYC street artist, decided to shadows that many outside objects make to create street art. Michael only uses chalk and stone sediment to outline the shadows into stencils looking like figure. The rule that Neff uses for his work is that the shadow or the empty space where the shadow was has to catch someone’s eye.

I believe that this simple art creates such a large impact to observers as shadows aren’t usually seen and noticed as something spectacular and unique.

“As for why I chose chalk, I have been interested in graffiti for a long time. I used to photograph Shepard Fairy’s wheatpaste and sticker work as far back as 1998. I knew that working in the street was going to equate me with graffiti and street art but I didn’t feel pressure to use spray paint. In fact, I recognized that a lot of the best shadows fell on buildings. People’s homes. And I didn’t want to deface people’s homes. I wanted to share something beautiful and surprising. And if someone didn’t like it they could wash it away or wait for it to rain. The photograph is an important part of the work so the fact that the drawing is very fugitive doesn’t bother me. In fact, I think it’s great when people tell me they’ve run across the drawings in person. There haven’t been that many and they don’t last very long so that is a special experience.”

I love the way that his work is very simplistic but creates such an impact to the people who look at it, another aspect of his work that I like is that he creates his work in public places, this makes people stop and think about what the artists was thinking when creating these traces of shadows as they would not have been noticed as just a normal shadow.

Object

Wear a chair

Different ways a chair can be represented

Pablo Reinoso

Pablo Reinoso, an artist and furniture designer, adapts the traditional aesthetics of antique chair designs to create unique works of wood art and fashion.

Here is a wooden dress which is meant to look like a part of a chair. The chair bottom has been flipped backward, the back has been elongated and the central structure forms a kind of skirt. Even though there is a limit to how useful and comfortable these pieces are, it makes you think about how you can take an everyday item and use it in a completely new context which then inspires you to think about the use of it in its new context. 


I particularly like his work as I love the way he has adapted the chair and the different parts of it so that you can actually wear it to some extent, still keeping the original forms of a chair. I also like the fact that you can tell that each one of his designs is part of a chair as he as positioned the parts as if you were actually sitting down on a chair.