First Year Portfolio

Due to being incredibly busy throughout the year and not wanting to talk about a project after i've spent 3 consecutive all nighters on it- this blog was left a bit desolate. However as a recap on the year I thought I would talk a bit about the projects that featured in my end of year portfolio and some of my favourites.

My final major project which spanned 8 or so weeks was taken from a one day project we had at the beginning of the year entitled "The Human Echo". I was experimenting with the idea that in todays society we are hugely focused on our internet presence and the preservation of it after we die.  Another area I was interested in was the idea that everything that is written on the internet, every search engine query, every comment, every photo that is posted gets archived. There has been constant battle that families face when their loved one dies not only with their tangible belongings but with their facebook profiles/ email accounts ect. So much so that in 2009 facebook decided to allow family members to memorialise a loved ones account- since then it has been estimated that over 30 million accounts on the site are inactive due to death of the owner. However if you wish for the account of a loved one to be removed off the site you will face another battle, due to the unread t&c of the site which states that they have ownership of everything that you have added and can do with it what they please- (seeing a deceased loved one on an advert maybe something that is with us in the future, who knows.) So with this in mind I decided to make sense of our permanence on the internet but in a more tangible way. I went about downloading my entire facebook archive which was HUGE for my small 4 years on the site. I then created a vessel for my data in the form of a traditional burial piece- an urn. Before it was biscuit fired I filled the urn with my data and during the firing the information cremated leaving ash. I had an event of this and allowed people to be their during the ceremony and pay their regards. The invitation posted on facebook of course was open to anyone who was interested : (pasted here-!!)

WW1 project !! My tutor really hated this piece and only gave me a satisfactory !  but i don't really care because I really enjoyed making it and playing with different textures and shapes. Although it doesn't look very scary I think aesthetically the pink compliments the light grey very nicely.

Animatic project with Ariel- we had to develop a story using 3 stock images. 

   

I got a great opportunity to take some photographs behind the scenes as part of katies fashion 'photography and styling' brief ! It was so much fun to be a part of it :--)

One of the first projects of the year was called 'one panel narrative' where we had to illustrate as many actions as we good going on in one image. This is one of the projects that i'd like to revisit in the future as it was only a one day project + I want to redo it !

I created a short animation for The adaptation project where we had to adapt a piece of literature. We were given The Nose by Gogol where a man loses his nose and then finds it human sized walking around and of an upper class to himself. My idea was focused on a dream entering your nose.

 Us and them week project- in which we had to make an outcome using a set of mediums (print, 3d, collage) I chose to use print as it is something I want to learn a lot more about. My initial focus was on the idea of tourism in less economically developed countries as it's something that I find quite problematic. For example tourism brings a mass of jobs and boosts the overall economy, however this then can be exploited, workers underpaid and many beauitful areas of an untouched island destroyed- tourists can be ignorant and insulting to residents over their homes and views. It really is a double edged sword. After I did more research on the subject I found that duing the huricane disaster in Hatiti (a country close to my heart) a cruise liner docked on the shores whilst mere miles away hundreds of families were trapped under buildings, needing urgent medical attention and many were dead. The red cross hadn't got to the site yet- although a cruise liner did allowing hundreds of tourists to soak up the sun and leave without realisation of the devastation they had just left. According to a source/ many people who had written complaints to the cruise liner online- there is a metal gate been put up around the beach area of the complex, separating tourists from locals and also forcing the perception of tourists to see the island as a pleasant stop off point- during this time they are treated to massages, cocktails and a large buffet of food. Armed guards stand blocking the gated entrance of the area and there are starving locals standing the other side of the gate watching as the buffet gets consumed. With this in mind I wanted the image to have two sides which you can only see when you lay a piece of paper over the image/ or through "rose tinted glasses". Unfortunately working in screen printing was difficult and I found that i didnt get the results I wanted with the details + I also found it difficult to match the blue gel with the blue printing ink but after talking to my tutor i found that that kind of match was impossible due to the opacity + shade of the blue print compared to the translucent nature of the gel. Here is example footage: here

This is another group day project we had where we had to bring in a book and make it extraordinary ! We had 5 hours to do this, we worked really hard and managed to gather all the necessary equipment to turn this book on pond life into a book which you could use, learn + research whilst at the pond! Pages were laminated so that they wouldn't get soggy, the front had a lovely piece of textured moss, it also had a little built in specemin jar and a pair of magnifying glasses built into the back cover so you could lay the book on the lake and see whats going on ! oh and the cover was filled with foam so it would float!

.....and lastly my collection project! I decided to take on a large challenge with this one, my grandmother who has never thrown anything away let me gather every single (almost) letter that had ever gone through her door. There were bank statements, love letters, charity bin liners, elvis magazines, letters from daniel o'donnel, airmail letters - you name it ! So I spent a long time chronologically organising and scanning each one by one before loading them into indesign for a 600 page book. The bottom image is the back + front cover. I'd really love to get it properly printed so fingers crossed + im probably going to approach a publisher in the new year with it :--) here is a video of me flicking through it quickly.

i got full marks !