Friday 31 January 2014

I was introduced to the amazing work of Bernd and Hilla Becher today. The couple produced photographic typologies of German industrial structures. They meticulously photographed thousands of structures in black and white allowing the viewer to appreciate their beauty and innovative construction. I'm not sure where all this is leading, perhaps I could tie this into London somehow...All I know is, I LOVE these images and I definitely want to explore photography further in my project.





From researching these guys, I also found the work of Idris Khan. He is work draws influence from art history and philosophy and often, as shown in the following images, he layers the work of other artists over and over to make new pieces. I found it interesting and inspiring to see how his work had been used as album sleeves for the editors. This is definitely a context that I'd like to see me work in in the future.



Wednesday 29 January 2014

My latest results from the darkroom...These images were taken as part of a collaborative project with Caitlin Parks focusing on the abandoned Heygate Estate in south-east London.







Tuesday 28 January 2014

'All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within closed landscapes whose landmarks constantly draw us towards the past' Gilles Ivain

I've been reading about psychogeography and thinking about how I could map the city through a series of random walks and wanderings.

 

Monday 27 January 2014

'A house is a machine for living in' Le Corbusier

I've started to become obsessed with photographing all the industrial looking buildings around Wembley and staring at all the sububran wasteland that there is between here and central London. It's such a strange feeling living so close to the city but not quite in it. I'm starting to think I should make work about this. The environment that you inhabit has such an effect on your mental state and I definitely feel more of a shift towards depression whenever i come back to Wembley after being home in Kent.  I proposed this idea to Dave and he suggested looking at areas of London that I could afford to live in and photograph and draw them to give an idea of where people are really living if they're not in central.

 

Friday 24 January 2014

I watched a film simply called 'London' by Patrick Keiller to get some inspiration. It is pretty much a film of stills of different areas of London with narration from Paul Scolfield about a fictional character called Robinson.  It got me thinking about psycho geography and just wandering around London mapping different areas. I noted down a quote that I found very interesting and still relevant to today 20 years after the film was made.


Thursday 23 January 2014

Some brain storming for project ideas...I think I want to do it about London as it is the city I live in and I've always wanted to make work about it in some way. I'm finding it hard to decide what exactly I want to focus on though and whether I want to use a narrative as a basis for the project or not.



Wednesday 22 January 2014

Last week I had a great day out in London visiting exhibitions. In the morning I started off at LCC to see a display of Tom Eckersley's posters. It was great to see some old school screen prints that were created to be reproduced and mass printed. The cleverness and beauty of the images really showed how graphic design became its own art form that didn't just exist for the sake of art but to serve a purpose of displaying information.


The next stop was the Science museum to see the 'Only in England' exhibition featuring work from Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr. I had not really heard of Tony Ray-Jones before I got to the exhibition and was mainly going to see Martin Parr's work but I actually preferred Ray-Jones. He inspired a lot of Parr's work in the way he captured British eccentricity. The display of Ray-Jones' pictures of English coastal towns  from the late '60s was fascinating. He managed to capture images full of narrative but also left a lot to the viewers' imagination as space between figures often created tension within the scene. I was pleased to have been inducted into the dark rooms the day before as I was able to understand more about the process of printing and looking at negatives. 



The day ended at the Serpentine Sackler gallery to see the Chapman brothers show. I hadn't seen any of their work in real life before so I was impressed by how much there was to see. Some of it was a bit too conceptually bullshit for me and the space was almost over crowded by the work but I loved the horrific landscapes made from small figurines. The attention to detail was immense and the commentary on consumer capitalism and our barbaric, destructive human nature was interesting. The 25 minute film that formed part of the 'Kino club' was pretty amusing as it acted as a sort of 'life of the artist' piss take. Sitting amongst mannequin members of the KKK was pretty disconcerting but also strengthened the Chapmans' message about how ridiculous they were as a group.






Monday 20 January 2014

Last week a group of us were inducted into the black and white dark rooms where we learned how to develop black and white films and later make contact sheets and prints from our negatives. I have always wanted to bring my photography into my work more as I have previously viewed it as being quite separate from illustration but by learning how to hand print my images I can see photography becoming more of a part of my practice. Here are my results from the day...

Test contact sheet measuring various exposure times




Prints of the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle - excuse the dirty scanner!



 
 




Catherine Anyango came to give us a talk today. She was a great speaker, offering lots of good advice. It was interesting to have a talk from someone who isn't necessarily just a practicing illustrator but also a fine artist. Lots of her work is heavily conceptual and her choice of materials comes from the subject matter of the work she is dealing with. I was particularly taken by her 'violent crimes' series where imagery comes from cctv footage, often documenting the last recorded images of someone's life. Here Anyango uses graphite to capture the grainy detail of the cctv camera. I'm not sure how this fits in with my work but I just found it really inspiring...





Thursday 2 January 2014

Another way of contextualising my work is by dropping some of my images into editorial articles written about Luang Prabang. I've been playing around with a spread from the Observer. The original article can be read online here.