Jesus was a rebel

When Jesus went through his rebellious teenage years, he probably owned a satan-powered motor-trike, but luckily god forgave him eventually and had him hung on a cross to die slowly and painfully.

Building up ideas for another collage and part of the continuing collaborative work between Lorraine Bennett and myself. I forgot to take my scissors with me (I feel naked!) so I can't make the couple of tiny adjustments needed before sticking-down time (chop off deer legs beneath wheel, trim down elephant horn, get rid of jesus' straggling hair).

I need to work on the backgrounds anyways, plain white cheap-ass paper looks a bit rubbish, I wouldn't put it on my wall in that state, so I can't imagine anybody else would want to, let alone kindly give me monies for it at a craft fair.

While in Macc, we met Rachel Grant who had the most beautiful research books and awesome interactive artworks. She posed the question "what makes you feel strong" and asked for responses to be wound together to make a cocoon of fragility and strength.

Landscape is bloody gorgeous up north.

Here is my inadequate doodle response. The two squiggles are cows from a very long distance, and I got distracted while drawing the wall bit.

Some kind of progress

Slowly starting to build up layers on this piece. We got my particular spin on illuminated manuscript, with all the letter forms taken from this old doodle from last year. Originally spelling "In the beginning" the famous phrase that begins a certain controversial old book, this is part of my attempt to recreate a science-based story about the beginning of the universe using religious visual language.

Not sure if it needs more doing to it yet but I'm liking where it's heading. Softened some of the rigid felt-tip lines with water to create a more organic look, to compliment the glass forms. Torn up graph paper, netting and stitching are used similarly to move away from the rigid outline of the squared paper. A lot of religious-based art borrows heavily from nature, so it wouldn't make sense to create an excessively man-made industrial-feeling piece.

Staffordshire Open Art Exhibition 2013

Memories by Mandy Billington, clay and mixed media

Not Another Soul- Coniston by Tracy Barlow, etching

Sketch Snapshots of Stafford by Keri Jayne, pen and ink

Seed Heads in Autumn by Rebecca Doyle, mixed media

Joyous days I have a goddamn phone! hooray! Above are photos taken (by my handy new 2 mega pixel phone camera) from the 2013 Staffordshire Open Art Exhibition at Shire Hall Gallery in Stafford. Exhibition is open til 14th July 2013.

Currently the only way I can get photos off said phone is by posting them on Facebook, so I had to spam folks with fuzzy mobile pictures, which I feel slightly guilty of. Speaking of which, I made a handy little failbook page for this happy little blog which whoever's interested or too polite to refuse my invitation is welcome to like. Who knows, maybe I can trick somebody into reading this shit on a regular basis.

The last Links post for a while

Just got a few links left that I wasn't able to make into a nice shiney themed post. So I suppose this weeks links are all relatively unlinked links (hur hur hur!)

http://www.uva.co.uk/category/work

United Visual Artists. It's so...geometry and shiney lights. I love flicking through the stuff on their work page, gorgeous.

http://www.valentinatanni.com/

Art blog about internet culture, which is a super interesting read. It's been going on for over ten years! Christ I am way too late on this whole thing, bloody fascinating.

http://dappledsky.com/

This blog is about nurturing the artistic community in Stoke-on-Trent, which is currently something I'm really interested in. It kind of blows my mind that there even is an art community in Stoke, since there's not much else. It's like discovering an orchid growing out of a turd.

http://www.site.rachel-grant.com/Portfolio.html

Somehow I've only just come across the work of Rachel Grant because somebody brought up her name when I was making more glass with the Cultural Sisters and Percy the dog. What have I been doing with my life???

http://cargocollective.com/justyna_sarsari

Last but not least, Justyna's portfolio. She was in my class before I had to leave university and the photo above is of work from her degree show. The lady is a force of nature and her work is fucking fantastic. I'd tell somebody to give her a prize, but shit man, they already did.

Began mounting the glass work for my portfolio, just needs silicon-ing in place. Squared paper gives it a nice scrap-book feel. Blue felt-tip pen geometric drawings to make the thin blue glass strips melt in seamlessly. It's strange because I preferred the top drawing the most when it was in front of me, but I think the bottom image looks better now it's on the computer screen.

Can't help thinking that it's missing something though. Stitching? Inks? collage? Not quite sure yet so it might be one of those leave-it-for-a-few-days-and-come-back-to-it jobs. It's gonna drive me mad trying to think of what it needs. Letters? Might try dabbing water onto the lines in the top drawing (I always use washable felt tips for that exact purpose). Or maybe it just needs re-drawing completely.

It's so irritating knowing that there's just something not quite right about it.

Comic update post

Been thinking and working on ideas for comic project, this is its most recent incarnation. part of me feels like I need to make it into several pages instead of just one canvas. Considering making a long wall-hanging. The blank triangles are where I've stared placing my glass pieces to work them into the composition. 

I kinda have visions of black netting and hand-stitched writing and squares and glass, hand-generated typography that becomes part of the story instead of just telling the story. 

Starting to wonder if I even need to create an angel narrator. I might use the research I've got so far into angels as motifs and collage instead.

I feel really inspired by the people I've met and the techniques I've learned during my year away from university, and I feel like I should bring these feelings and ideas together. I started out months and months ago reading up on cosmology and visiting observatories, drawing churches and researching the stories and language I was brought up with.

When I started experimenting with materials in the beginning of January this year I stepped away from the ideologies and started creating my own visual language. Now I know how this piece is going to feel. Gothic, arts and crafts, cute with serious undertones.

Recently went back to the Cultural Sisters to make some more flat glass pieces. When I saw the glass from before, they looked like test pieces and I just wanted to make more and experiment with shapes and colours. Because of how much glass can change in firing, I'm not totally sure what to expect yet but I'm looking forward to seeing the finished results. They look bigger than the last few things I've made and use more bluey purpley colours with a hint of green, moving away from red completely. 

Also this is the dog I've been looking after this week, because this post has far too much writing in it and needs more pictures!

Joseph Cornell Wallpapers?

http://www.josephcornellbox.com/wallpaper.htm

I remember my first week of University I was told to go to the library and study Joseph Cornell just because, and so I grabbed the first book I found and took some half-arsed photos that I had long forgotten about until I was sorting through my picture files yesterday. Thought I'd give it a google today to jog my memory and OH MY GOD YES there's a website dedicated to him with free wallpapers <3 beautiful, sexy wallpapers.

I sincerely regret not immediately building a shrine to this guy's artwork in my shitty dorm in halls, what on earth was I thinking??? I guess I can always correct this mistake when I go back there in September.

I am not worthy.

Alan Fletcher's Archives

http://alanfletcherarchive.com

This website makes me very happy :) You can organise by genre! You can organise by era! You can organise by all those other things that they let you organise his work by. Fun!

Links

This week's post is inspired by The Macabre and Beautifully Grotesque's facebook page. (their cover photo is Bosch, the saucy minx!)

http://www.whokilledbambi.co.uk/
Basically a site dedicated to art that defecates on your childhood dreams, which is something I am always able to take the time out to enjoy.

http://www.eyesuckink.com/

Speaking of things I always have time for, Alex Pardee's website. Grew out of my shady teenage years loving his style and trying to emulate it, and then I got involved in ceramics and that all went to shit and my work somehow became rather cutesy in comparison.

http://www.rustin.be/exposition-passees
Unsettling? Genitalia on every page? Somewhat disturbing? Why yes, yes it is, and yet it's still so painfully compelling.

http://www.miguellealart.com/

Portraits. Scary, scary portraits! Wonderful textures, collage and intense mark-making, loving Miguel Leal right now.

http://www.helenelagnieu.fr/

From her website "Mes recherches se concentrent sur les processus d’ hybridation, la mise à nu et la décortication de l’anatomie humaine et animale." and in case you can't read french she's all about the process of hybridisation mixing the anatomies of humans and animals. At least that's how I roughly interpret it because I can also barely read french and I'm too lazy to stick it into google translate and then go back and correct everything it gets wrong. My abysmal linguistics aside, those drawings! Oh my god those beautiful drawings <3

I'm finally running low on links so this might be the last of one of these posts, but I have actually really enjoyed compiling these things.

Links

This week, our links are going to be nice and largely craft-themed, in contrast to last weeks geekier font post.

First off:

http://www.unittwelve.co.uk/

Kaboom, new Unit 12 website! Unit Twelve is like a big iron storage barn thing on a farm that is filled with beautiful things, should you ever be lucky enough to be in the area. It houses several busy artists (well they don't live there or anything, just work there) who sometimes run workshops where you get a chance to drink many hot beverages and enjoy being arty for a day.

http://www.emilynotman.co.uk/index.htm

Emily Notman being one of the artists at Unit 12 that I did a textiles workshop with in January. Her work is always super intricate and gorgeous and she was super nice and funny.

http://www.annacollettehunt.com/

I regret using the word beautiful in practically the first paragraph of this post, because I'm running out of imaginative words to descibe how nice I think the work I'm linking to is. All the colours and the details. Anna Collette Hunt is primarily a ceramicist, I urge people to admire her work.

http://charlottemacey.co.uk/home.html

Really cute fabric patterns made into all kinds of useful products.

(Button designed by Jenny Brindley)

http://victoriascholes.blogspot.co.uk/

There's going to be a button exhibition in Macclesfield (Barnaby Festival 14th-30th June!). I am too excited about this. Victoria Scholes is helping to organise this (might be the main organiser) and has some gorgeous photos of some of the submissions so far. I need to convince somebody else that it's going to be the best thing evar so that I can hitch a lift. Really don't want to miss it.

Bee Dude Vs Sword-weilding Crabtopus

These collages were done in my rather portable A5 sketchbook, continuing on from this previous post. I like to imagine that the two creatures have a terrible vendetta that they need to settle. Visually, I'd say that Bee-guy-thing wins but if I think the crab-thing with a sword would be physically more deadly.

Recently my grandmother decided not to throw away her super nice big shiney camera and donated it to The Cause, so these less blurry than usual pictures are courtesy of that. It has a manual zoom. A MANUAL ZOOM PEOPLE. I'm so happy.

Odd Volumes by Laura Steele

http://surrealvisions.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/odd-volumes/

Her blog Surrealvisions is full of beautiful :')

Seriously considering entering this

http://www.thenationalopenartcompetition.com/

Think it'd be an awesome way to finish off my gap year, even if I don't get in it would be nice to know that at least I can do these things.

Plus, I'm loving the work entered by Verity Burton last year, and competitions like this allow me to find out about work like hers.

Clementine I cut mountboard and etching ink on wood panel
Verity Burton 2012

Glass experiments

Here are the glass pieces I did under the kind supervision of The Cultural Sisters in Longport. Some of them didn't turn out exactly as I expected but I think they're all pretty great so far.

Above is one of my pre-firing photos for comparison.

I wanted to try creating the above comic grid layout I designed earlier in the year in different materials, such as my foray into textiles.

I guess its kinda funny that I took my original inspiration from windows in gothic architecture and now I've done a full circle and I'm trying to make drawings of windows out of glass. 

I made some smaller triangles which I thought could be incorporated into the final comic because there are a lot of triangular shapes and arches within gothic architecture. Glass was often used to tell biblical stories, so it would be my attempt to nod back to that.

The flower motif was created by cutting out paper and placing it between two layers of glass. I thought it would burn away and the silhouette of the flower would be seen in the glass frit around it. I suppose I didn't contend for the fact that the paper wasn't exposed to any air and even if it did burn, it wouldn't have anywhere to go.

Here is lots of links to art and design-related things I am looking at at the moment. I've been doing social networking so that my facebook now looks more like stuff I am interested in and less like sonograms and other overly revealing tidbits from people I met in a drunken haze three years ago.

http://www.theartbay.co.uk/

-A Local Gallery in Fenton, Stoke-on-Trent

http://ourownfuture.org/

-Website is a bit 90's-looking but they've recently set up a shop in Wolverhampton that only sells work that is handmade by artists and craft peoples from the local area.

http://vimeo.com/38459378

-Video about independant store Yellowstone Art Boutique in Trentham, Stoke-on-Trent that sells and exhibits work from contemporary artists and makers. I also love their branding!

http://thedsgnblog.com/

-Beautiful website showcasing work by young designers across the globe

http://www.daydelosmuertos.blogspot.co.uk/

-Day Of The Dead, gorgeous photos of abandoned places worldwide. I love derelict buildings, they are soo beautiful.

I do have a list of further links but this post started to look kinda silly with content and I wanted to write something about all of them so that I don't miss anybody out. Might make links a weekly thing til I run out of em for a while.