Kingston University: Christmas Project

Over Christmas, we were given instruction to 'research' three different texts:

'Cheers' by Jayne Anne Phillips

'Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second' by Paul Farley

'Come and Go' by Samuel Beckett

Click through for videos of them being performed or read. I was really excited to receive this small pre-brief, if you like, and we were to respond to them in any way we liked, whether that be analytical writing, an image, a collection of objects, photographs, etc. I found this a really interesting way to show what we can do, and I think for our class, will show a lot about the person who makes the work.

This is going to be a long, hearty blogpost, so if you're just looking for pictures...this is perhaps not the best post!

'Cheers' is the perfect piece of text for me, as it is just chock full of colour and texture, and just oozes this time and place that I adore. It absolutely screamed collage, but as collage is most definitely not my forte, I did it my way and decided to make a surface pattern. Certain aspects of the text really appealed to me, and I wanted to portray objects and environment. The words, 'Beatiful Bounty' and 'Lord, you do look pretty' really stuck out to me. As a textiles lover, and as this piece was about sewing and dressmaking, I decided to stitch the words onto fabric, and scan them in.

That task was extremely taxing in itself, but it worked out pretty well, and I wouldn't mind using it again! The postcard, and the "pins between her teeth and lipstick gone grainy in the cracks of her mouth" also really caught my attention, so I decided to make some images on postcards. I used watercolour first, before layering with oil pastels. I feel like it gives the right amount of texture.

The surface pattern itself needs a little work, but with the time restraints I couldn't afford to get too worked up about it! However, it does give it a little reference to a time period perhaps, and where this piece of text is describing.

'Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second' was more of a struggle, and I don't think I truly understood what it meant until I talked to Hannah about it after doing this piece. In hindsight though, I think that it demonstrates the poem pretty well, and it turned out to be the one that I am most happy with, and I feel like I put my old skills in GCSE graphics to apply to what I'm doing now. I would love to make this into a print, and could perhaps develop into a series of prints depicting all the different scenes that he describes.

'Come and Go' was by far the hardest to convey, as it is a really physical piece of work (of course, as all theatre is), and yet we had to respond in a way that wasn't just... performing the play itself. The pattern and character of the piece was so specific, that I found this one very difficult to do. I ended up using photography, and trying to capture the anonymous woman, and mostly I wanted to play with lighting. Photography is very much a recent love, and although I have done many photoshoots for various projects, this is the first where I have experimented with the technicalities of it. Part of me wishes I could have used film, but with time constraints, this would probably have not been so successful. This certainly can go somewhere, as a photographic series, or turned to drawing, but we'll see how it pans out!

It's been an interesting few weeks, and I have tried my best to experiment as much as possible. I very much wanted to steer clear of three drawn images, as I don't think that I would challenge myself enough to make an interesting image. I feel with these as research, I can truly develop into something more refined and edited. It has really been enlightening to explore three parts of my interests as an artist and image maker, as opposed to 'The Illustrator'. I feel like illustration is much more than that, and in the bigger picture, we have so much more to give.