Waking up at some ungodly hour this morning was particularly grim, but my housemate had invited me to explore the infamous Eton. I accepted out of an urge to have a good old snoop and to really see how the other half live. It didn’t disappoint.

It did however, contradict the image of Eton I had in my head. No less lavish, but I had expected some secluded castle nestled in London overspill. The college, instead, had more of a feel of Oxford University. Sprawled over the town of Windsor were the buildings that housed lots of upperclass boys dressed in their white bow ties and black tails. Our tour started with the choir concert in the chapel which had what has to be the most ornate Organ that I’ve ever seen. So decorative, in fact, that it took me a couple of moments to realise that was actually what it was.

We proceeded to the library, through the corridors the headmasters office and his ‘suite for guests’ were located. Lining the corridors were portraits of each of the headmasters in varying artistic styles. Annoyingly I couldn’t take many photos in the library as they weren’t permitted, but I managed to sneakily take a couple- I couldn’t get a photo of the first European edition of the bible, however, as this was strictly guarded at all times.

We explored the art department and they had some particularly impressive work on display by the Artist in resident, and had an exhibition of work by the artist Adam Ball. One of his pieces I plan to explore further and feature here but I’m waiting for him to respond with a professional photo of the piece of work.

I had a great day exploring, it was an absolutely mad place with a hell of a lot of money poured into it. Wealth practically dripped from the silk drapery. The opportunities in tech alone were astounding, with GCSE students building fully functioning soapbox style race cars. However, my favourite thing to come out of today was the photo I took at the station this morning, definitely made it worth getting up so early.

 

  

For our one-day project we had to explore the composition of space by creating a sculpture out of provided corrugated card and masking tape. We were given a selection of themes to explore and could choose whether or not we wanted to reference our own compositional awareness projects. I chose to do both by looking at personal space and recreating on of my pictograms at the same time.

I was really pleased with the result! I had a very sculptural approach to my model, rather than the more precise approach others appeared to take. I built up the structure of the models face using layers of cut cardboard and finished by covering it completely in masking tape to give it a smooth surface. Whilst I got a lot done I think I will be carrying on the project, I want to paint the model white and paint on eyes so it really looks like the drawing I’ve worked from! It would be great to then expand the project further by creating a film or gif using the man as the subject.

 

Samantha Lippett graduated with first class honours in Illustration from Brighton University. Having completed her degree, Lippett felt that Illustration in its most fundamental form wasn’t particularly well suited to her. As a result she has since pursued a career in curating and has most recently graduated from Goldsmiths University with a masters in the subject.

Her final piece for her degree was a video cut from YouTube films of women having home births in the states, publicly shared to the internet as part of a body ownership movement. She creatively layered parts of the clips with captions of comments made by men using the videos as pornographic material. After completing it, which required hours of research and trawling through gross material, she then uploaded it to the internet with appropriate tags the men had been using to find the videos in the first place. Her film was removed by YouTubedue to ‘inappropriate content.’

Samantha is a very well accomplished 24 year old. Straight out of University she took on an internship with the Birth Rites Collection that took her to New Mexico to work with Native Midwives and explore their perspective of birth. After a year with the Manchester based Collection she began to feel under appreciated by the director, and felt she was getting little credit for her work. She spoke a lot in the talk of how important it is to be happy where you are working, and to be proud of what you are doing. Whilst she didn’t regret her work with the collection she felt strongly that 2014 was the right time for her to move on.

After this Samantha undertook her masters at Goldsmiths. She has organised various symposiums since then for professionals to discuss maternity and representations of pregnancy in art. I personally have a particular interest in ideas of maternity and so found her talk incredibly engaging. Samantha gave us lots of advice and emphasised the importance of gaining consent when creating film pieces. However she also talked of how after a few years she made the decision to move on from looking at pregnancy in her work as she didn’t want to pigeonhole herself in to a box category.

On the back of this lecture I want to look into some of the Artists Samantha recommended, including Kiki Smith and Mary Kelly. I thoroughly enjoyed her visit and look forward to following her and her future works.

I have to say I am quite gutted with the overall response to our group work from our crit. Having worked so hard and felt that our group all contributed whole heartedly to the final images, it was quite upsetting that the tutors had little to say that was positive. It’s hard to know, however, if I’m just being over sensitive. But I am worried that I came across as being quite overbearing in the presentation as I definitely feel I was being quite fiery in response to the critique.

The main thing that the tutors pulled us up on was the inconsistency in the selected images. But this isn’t something that was accidental; we selected the images we presented for being the best examples of how light was being used in different ways through our exploration of the brief. It’s hard to know how to respond as we could easily have chosen 12 images that followed a more succinct theme but we wanted to show the extent of the skills we had learned throughout the three weeks.

I still really love our final two images, and if I had chosen the final twelve images on my own I probably would have chosen differently, I’ll admit. But I feel like the 12 images we selected were strong examples of how light was being manipulated for the project. There is a real playfulness in the palette of the two photos we used for the final outcome, and the kinetic element incorporated using the slow shutter speed gives them a certain unpredictability. I can see where we could explore the themes in our work in more detail and will consider this when approaching the rest of my solo exploration of the brief.

    

Beginning in January with the death of David Bowie and continuing through to present day with the election of Donald Trump, I think it’s safe to say that 2016 has been a disaster.

On the morning of the twenty third of June I woke up smack on 5am to the seemingly impossible. Millions of voters woke up in the same position; in a daze of disappointment, confusion and disdain at 51% of the voting population. Brexit had won. People turned on each other even more so than they had before the result and the population immediately divided. I felt like I’d lost a sense of pride in my country that I never even knew I had in the first place.

This is why I know how so many Americans are feeling. The entire world is watching and waiting for the fallout from this decision and if the peak in attacks on minorities is anything like that from the rise in profile of Trump’s campaign then we can look forward to many more in the coming years. The simple fact that America would rather elect a man as despicable as Donald Trump than a woman is something I wish would take longer to deconstruct than it does. I think ultimately it is scarier that in a modern day where people are reaching new heights of connectivity and openness that such a vast amount of people are still opting to vote for hateful, small minded ideas of nationalism.

I am aware that all of this is very obvious and not a particularly revolutionary way of thinking. However in my defence it’s very hard to write on a subject when you’re still so dumbfounded about how it could have ever happened in the first place.

Artwork credited to Ilma Gore and @issuepress

John Berger has long been a big name in art criticism and the documentary recently featured on BBC 4 titled ‘The Art of Looking’ looks at and discusses with Berger his life achievements. There is particular emphasis on the present, and the way that he has re-evaluated ideas of looking and seeing as a result of his recent cataract operation.

One of the things that particularly interested me was the way a colleague of Berger’s spoke about his appreciation for candid photography. When sourcing images for his books he tended to steer away from stereotypically beautiful photographs, instead favouring ones that didn’t have the feel of being staged. This is an important aspect of photography to explore as it appeals to a certain nostalgia everyone possesses and gives further validity in its authenticity.

Being so politically driven, Berger left Britain in the 1960s to live in a small village in the French Alps. Here he and his wife found solitude in a quieter life and he spent all of his time immersed in his writing. His son speaks in the documentary of how Berger never seemed to be completely at home in France or England, but the political state of France at the time was much more preferable to the turmoil Thatcher was creating. In 1972 Berger won the Booker Prize for his book ‘G,’ and donated half of his winnings to the Black Panther movement in America.

It’s inspiring seeing a man of his age still passionate about his life’s work. It was also reassuring to hear him speak of his education, and of how he didn’t start writing art criticism until he was 25. This means that I safely have 3 years to figure out what I’m going to spend my life doing! But seriously, the documentary was really beneficial to furthering my approach to ways of seeing and taught me to always approach images as an “interrogation of appearances.”

Many of the more successful images captured at the pier were of its more kinetic elements. There’s a liveliness in the blurring of the light, and the outcomes are really unpredictable. The patterns created by this technique would make great backgrounds for illustrations.

Some of the members of our groups experimented with the use of a slower shutter speed at the pier. Looking at the results today they have produced some very aesthetically pleasing photos. I really love the colour palette in the images above, I am particularly drawn to the pink, blue and yellow combination and fell it has created an image really different to the outcomes we were presented in our briefing. It’s contrasting in how bright and abstract the use of light is and looks almost like a textiles print rather than a photograph.

This would be a great technique to explore further as a group and I may look into using these images as the backgrounds for my final solo exploration.