Manchester Art gallery/ Do It Exhibition.

Art For All: Thomas Horsfall's Gift to Manchester.

This display explores a selection of nature-themed artworks and objects from the city’s Thomas Horsfall collection. As nature is a massive influence in my work, I really enjoyed looking at different artists interpretations in a variety of media.

It was interesting to see paintings of so many places that I knew and had visited. I saw two paintings of the landscapes of Conniston Lake (Lake District) and Lake Maggiore (Italy), both of which I have been to. One painting was painted from Chester Road, which is the main road where I live. It was interesting to look into the history of these places; seeing Chester Road surrounded by fields with cows in was a welcome contrast to the current towns and villages on the outskirts of Manchester.

One thing that caught my eye was a print that was displayed with the series of carved printing blocks used to make it. As I am interested in the variety of printing processes, it really got me thinking about block printing, and made me want to try a similar process like Lino Cutting and Printing myself.  

Hidden amongst the watercolour and oil paintings was a gorgeous hand woven Silk Demask fabric by William Morris & Co in 1881 called Oak. It was lovely to see, as Morris has been my inspiration for a long time now, with his delicate floral designs from the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Do It 2013 - A world premiere for Manchester International Festival

The 'Do It' exhibition was initiated by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier 20 years ago, and consists of a variety of instructions for artists to follow in order to make the art. 'Do it' has been enacted in 50 different places, making it the widest-reaching and longest running ‘exhibition in progress’ ever to occur. This links really well to the work I intend to do this week based on Sol LeWitts instruction based conceptual, minimalist art.

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, and in homage to the original idea, this exhibition premieres 70 brand new instructions, bringing together artists from the first do it experiments with a new generation of contemporary artists such as Tracey Emin.

Below are some of my favourite pieces from the exhibiton as well as the Instruction the artist was given to create it.

^ Liam Gillick (Instruction 1989): Using a pipe and a cable detector locate all the cables an metalwork hidden below the surface of chosen wall. Loosely mark their location using a light blue pencil.

^ Yoko Ono (Wish Piece 1996): y.o. '96. Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friends to do the same. Keep Wishing. Untill the branches are covered with wishes.

^ Alison Knowles (Homage to Each Red Thing 1996): Divide the exhibition space floor into squares of any size. Put one red thing into each square. For example: A piece of fruit, A red doll with a red hat, A shoe. Completely cover the floor in the way.

What I loved about this exhibition, was its openness to interpretation. Any artist could have followed the same instruction and come up with something similar, yet different. It reminded me of the Oblique Strategy Cards which can be used to inspire any creative mind. 

I look forward to giving some people specific instructions as an experiment to see how different people interpret them. I also want to try giving people a more vague set of instructions to see how different the results will be.

Bridgewater Hall

Music has always played a big part in my life, but I have never thought about linking my passion for music to my art before. When visiting the bridgewater hall last week there was a percussion concert in the foyer and one piece in particular gave me some artistic inspiration. The original piece of music was written for the piano and is shown below. It is called Phases, and was written by Steve Reich.

The piece is played by 2 or more musicians who play exactly the same piece of music: whilst one remains at a constant speed, the other gradually speeds up until the bars of the music eventually overlap.  I thought I could incorporate this in some way to my artwork, for example drawing the same thing with two hands, one acting faster than the other? Or stretching or compressing my work to make them have different 'speeds'.

Abigail Reynolds - First Cut exhibition!

 I have begun to look at some relevant paper artists, to give me some inspiration based on how I can communicate my ideas imaginatively through the medium of paper.

After visiting an exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery called The First Cut recently, I saw Abigail Reynolds's work, and was inspired by the way she used paper to convey ideas an images, on a complex level.

An Artist reference sheet, showing Abigail's work next to some of my interpretations of her work. I love the way her work merges two pictures so that both can be seen effectively. Does the image of trees and a building show what was there before and after construction?

These are my two interpretations of her work, using some of the scanned in drawings which I created earlier on in the unit.

Alice Kettle - London.

After recently visiting 'The Queens House' as part of Greenwich Royal Museum in London, I saw an exhibition featuring Alice Kettle, and one particular piece caught my eye because it isn't the kind of work I usually see her do.

The piece called 'Flower Helix', 2013, and is made up of Alice Kettles work with contributions from a variety of makers. It fell down the centre of a spiral staircase, and further inspired me to create an installation piece for my exhibition.

I love how delicate and elegant the installation is, with the subtle tangled threads and I think I could create something similar with my work, maybe involving light as well to enlarge the installation on walls, linking to my shrinking and enlarging.

Cornelia Parker

During a visit to Manchester Art Gallery, I found this piece called 'Marks made by Freud, Subconsciously' by Cornelia Parker. I was particularly interested in it because it appeared that the person viewing this image must have shrunk to see this image on such a close up scale. It is a close up zoomed image of a leather couch which shows a journey or period in Freuds life.

After researching into her as an artist more, I discovered that her main specialty was installations and sculpture. Her pieces captivate the imagination, and I could see myself doing an installation piece like hers for my final outcome.

First Cut exhibition!

Today I went to Manchester Art Gallery to see the First Cut exhibition and it completely blew me away! It was by far the most inspiring, intriguing and exciting exhibition I have ever been to! So much of it related to my Journeys project, so it was a shame that I didn't know about the exhibition earlier!

Every single piece in the gallery inspired me for different reasons but Sequel by Nicola Dale was one piece that linked extremely well to my journeys project. It is a felled ten foot oak tree adorned with thousands of individually cut leaves from maps and unwanted reference books. This linked with my journeys project because I concentrated on the nature that I found on my journey, and this piece incorporated both nature and journeys (maps).  When I thought more into the concept, it was also interesting how trees had been cut down to make the paper for the maps, which was being put back onto a tree as leaves for this exhibition, and then was put back into a promotional exhibition book as a printed picture, back on paper.

 

The exhibiton also allowed me to see so many artists which I have used for years as references as inspiration, but I have never had the oportunity to see their artwork before in person. These artists include Sue Blackwell, Rob Ryan, Peter Callesen, Yuken Teruya and Elisabeth Lecourt. Their work has inspired me for so long because of their delicate balance between skill and creativity; they produce art which makes me think and inspires creativity in my own work. Here are some examples of theirs from the exhibition.

Su Blackwell

Peter Callesen

Yuken Teruya

Some pieces in the Gallery inspired me because they were so clever and made you go 'wow'. Some examples are shown below.

Manabu Hangai, Wonder Forest
Using Seaweed raw hemp paper pigment and a range of recycled materials, Hangai created this piece inspired by humans interaction with nature. He created an immersive environment that the public could walk through. I loved how the branches were suspended from the ceiling, so with draughts they span gently, giving a very natural, 'outdoorsy' feel.

Justine Smith, Money Map of the World
For this piece, the artist sourced current issues of bank notes from all over the world and created a very accurate map of the world with them. It isn't like any other map, as it doesn't necessarily represent countries, or political groups, it represent economics. For example, areas of Europe all have the same note yet they are different countries, so it isnt your typical world map.

Andrea Dezsö, Living Inside Tunnel Books
These consisted of hand sew and cut paper tunnel books with interactive LED lights which I thought had a lovely effect with the shadows and light created. They represent small, handmade theatre sets with layers of paper creating three dimensional scenes. I love how such a flat media like paper can create a very 3D image, as lots of artists had done in this exhibition.

Long-Bin Chen, Twist Angel 6!
This is a life sized human figure suspended from the ceiling. The books are strung together with the spines facing up, and the carved surface is underneath. He uses 'valuable' books such as the New York phone book, which are now considered unimportant with the Internet being so readily available, and gives them a new lease of life.

The whole exhibition was so inspiring and its given me lots of inspiration for my next project; its a shame that I couldn't write about more of it! 

Liverpool Biennial

Yesterday I went to Liverpool for an art filled day. I found lots of inspiration throughout the whole day, from the fabric pattern on the coach seats to the peachy orange pillars of Albert Dock.

Two pieces that I saw particularly caught my eye, and the first was at the Walker Art Gallery. It is named Waiting and was created by an artist called Zheng Jiang.

It is made using oil paints and I love how the tone in the piece is created by subtle changes in colour and the detailed pattern embedded in the piece. When taking a closer look, the pattern was cleverly painted to make it look as though it was engraved in wood.

The next piece I saw at the Tate, and it confused me at first. My first reaction was ‘how is this art’. At first glance it looked like any ordinary map of the UK, however on a closer look, it had been cleverly collaged to mix towns and cities around. For example, Manchester was in Scotland and Glasgow was near Cornwall. Its called United Kingdom and is by Layla Curtis. I probably spent the most amount of time looking at this piece, intruiged by her placement of locations. Her collage was so well done that main roads linked together and the shapes and islands of the British Isles were also very accurate, so if someone didn’t know the real map very well, they wouldn’t have thought twice that it was a collage. This piece also gave me more inspiration for the brief ‘Journeys’, and I’m looking forward to trying some of these tecniques in my work for this project.