Slinkachu

Slinkachu is a street artist and photographer who creates street artwork on a small scale and in a humorous manor. One of his most well known collections, The 'Little People Project', started in 2006 which involves repainting and remodelling miniature characters from train sets. He leaves his scenes on the street as a street art installation, and then takes photographs. 

"The street-based side of my work plays with the notion of surprise and I aim to encourage city-dwellers to be more aware of their surroundings. The scenes I set up, more evident through the photography and the titles I give these scenes aim to reflect the loneliness and melancholy of living in a big city, almost being lost and overwhelmed. But underneath this, there is always some humour. I want people to be able to empathise with the tiny people in my works."

One of his other well known collections is called 'Inner City Snail' in which he 'graffitis' on snails as part of his artwork. I find this both amusing and clever at the same time. His moving artworks are a daily part of the city which people don't usually like, and he is taking people by surprise by the way he changes their appearance.

I enjoy the humour in his work, and find it very clever at the same time. He leaves the art in the street for people to come across which I also find very clever, involving the interaction of the public.

I'd love to take forward some of his ideas into my work. I like the idea of creating humour in my work, as well as getting people to think about the hidden messages, and involving the city around us. I also think the idea of creating small, shrunk, work would work well for me, so that when people see my work in an exhibition, they might need a magnifying glass to look at it closer, as though they were a large Alice, looking into a shrunken world.

Artist lectures.

Hetain Patel:
Yesterday Hetain gave us a lecture based on his work which inspired me because he used all sorts of media including photography and video which I haven't really done much with before.

This video caught my attention because it made me laugh. I liked the complex ideas behind it but it was so clever that I was intrigued to watch it.

I also liked his photographs of body art. He used various different media used in the cultures he was brought up in to represent his identity on his exterior.

We also had a chance to talk to him after the lecture and ask him questions. He gave use some good advice about collaboration; he said "collaboration should take you somewhere which neither of you could get to alone". He also told us that sometimes people just don't gel during a collaboration which is no-ones, fault but collaborations work better with friendship.

Susie Macmurray

Suzie also came into talk to us this week and her work is incredibly inspiring for me in this project in particular as I have already thought about doing an installation piece. 

Her work reminds me of the 3D work we did in embroidery, and I love the way she uses her materials to create illusions and textures.

For this piece she used the shells from pistachio nuts painted different colours which I thought was very interesting.

Idea development - Alice in Wonderland!

This week, as a group we all decided to go away and create a poster on any idea relating to 175 which we thought could be developed further as a project. The idea behind this was that all of us would look into an idea, but then today, decide on one idea which the group could look at developing over easter, so our work all had an underlying link.

As previously mentioned, at the start of the week I found the book alice in wonderland, and I loved some of the ideas and sentences that I found on page 175 so I decided that my poster would be a drawing based on page 175 of Alice in Wonderland.

I based the poster on a few Phrases from the page:

• "I dont care about the colour" [poster in black and white]
• waving itself passionately from side to side
• "if only her petals curled up a little more"
• The chapter name was called live flowers so I thought it would be good to do a flower, and one of the flowers mentioned on the page was a rose

When meeting up with my group today, we collectively decided that this was a good idea to run with, and that the book Alice in wonderland had many tangents and themes which we could all investigate, giving us an underlying theme. 

So for the next few days I am going to be investigating the different themes of alice in wonderland. So far I have come up with a few such as the idea of shrinking, figments of her imagination, and also the idea of disguise [such as a door to a secret land disguised as a tree]. There are also certain objects which I could decide to focus on such as clocks/watches, playing cards and flowers.

I will investigate various pathways throughout this week but so far the idea of shrinking has triggered the idea of 'tiny art'.

Willard Wigan is an artist that looks at art in the eye of a needle, on a microscopic scale. In this video he mentions that he tried to create Alice from Alice in Wonderland, but looking away for one second meant that she had gone!

I also like the idea of illusion photography so make an object look smaller than it is. As someone from my group wants to do enlarging, this might be a common ground where we could do collaborative photographs.

Unit X!

This week Unit X has started, and after a few days of feeling lost and confused, I am now getting excited; my head filling with lots of ideas to get me started.

As the Art school is celebrating its 175th Birthday this year, our project theme is 175.
I am starting to consider ways that I can use 175 to do my research to get some good ideas for a project.

For example, this page in my sketchbook involved going to a second hand book shop, and going to the 1st book case, the 7th shelf, and buying the 5th book, [1, 7, 5] which happened to be Alice in Wonderland.

When I got the book home, I photocopied page 175 and started to manipulate it. I cut strips of 0.175 inches, and squares of 175mm x 175mm.

I liked creating something with an idea that was very logical and ordered, but then by rearranging it, making it more random and in some cases chaotic.

As we are working in a group for the first time, I am looking forward to collaborating and learning about other peoples practice. As the final outcome is an exhibition, I am already thinking about creating an installation piece. I usually work quite flat and 2D, but the idea of having a space to exhibit my work is exciting me and making me think outside the 2D plane.

I like the way that this artist, Dawn Ng, uses the space to create a sort of illusion with objects that are as simple as triangles and paper planes. 

I would like to replicate this sort of illusion in my work, if my project leads in this sort of direction.