Essay Proposal

So this week we had to submit our essay proposals, which means that we had to make a more finalised decision on what our essays are on D:

So I have a vague idea kinda on what I want to do. I definitely want to look at fan culture in some form and was thinking of looking at the idea of fans using tshirts to express their involvement in this community/ fandom. I'm not sure how far I can take this idea but I suppose my lecturer will help me out with that.

It is a slight continuation of what I did last year so I decided to look at these books here:

I'm not really sure how relevant they will be but I don't think that it will have hurt too much to ave read them ;)

Anyway bye for now :)

Róisín -x

Mapping

So I haven't blogged as much as I planned to but I am going to blame some technical difficulties with blogger and the fact I was dying of the cold.

Any ways thought I would update you on the non-places situation.
My mini research sketchbook is almost done, I just want to take some more photographs to fill out the last few pages and then that's me.
What I've been working on the past few days is looking at the "Situationist International movement" and their work with psychogeography and dérive. With these theories (I'l let you google them yourself because I'm not sure I can explain them in one blog post... although heres the site I used: http://libcom.org/library/internationale-situationiste-2-article-1 ) they edited maps.

What made me think of this was I was trying to map out my old school seeing as it had been knocked down meaning that I couldn't go take pictures of it for my sketchbook.

So what I've done is redrew what I can remember of my school and added in what some areas were to me and where we used to sit/stand

I also have another idea which I'm calling "bags in places" for now. With this I was looking at how when we used to sit or stand in certian areas, we would almost 'claim' them with our bags. I thought that if I displayed groups of bags in f=different areas it would make an interesting installation piece.

Anyway that's all I have right now so here is some more sketchbook spam :P

So I'll see ya next time

byyyyyeeee!!

Róisín -

Non-places

So after our hand in of the pencils brief we were then given our new brief called 'Non-Places' which is a philosophical theory on what defines a place. I'm not going to go into too much detail about that seeing is it is an extremely deep concept which you could argue about for hours, so I'll just let you google it and make up your own mind. :P

So I'm kind of going between a few ideas at the moment, but I think the one I might try and stick to is my idea of looking at where youths go to hang out as normally these would be classed as non-places, like walls and stairwells etc. By them choosing to sit in these areas, they then change the definition of these non-places into places. (This brief is so confusing) I also have considered looking into social media as well, but I'm not sure if this was widen the topic too much. I might also branch out into looking at how as children the places we go are determined by our parents mostly, and as adults we tend to only ever go to "places" like work, home, bars etc.

Anyway now I'm just going to spam you with my sketchbook pages that I have so far. ;)

So that is where I am at with this project hopefully I can get some form of clear direction but I'm planning on talking to some of my lecturers on Monday to help give me some focus,

so until then
byye :)

Róisín - x

Pencil Brief!!

So over the first couple of weeks back we got our first mini brief which was the essence of the pencil. At first I was stumped, but a few mind maps later I had began to come up with an idea. I looked at what a pencil meant to me, and to me the pencil is an object that opened doors to maths English etc, so I started to look into the idea of unlocking.

 At first I though of trying to make a traditional lock with the pencil acting as the key, however I decided not persuade this given the complication of actually making the lock and the time scale of the brief. I then simplified the idea down and decided I wanted to arrange a line of pencils into the shape of the pins in the lock. 

I then played about with different ideas of the background and thought how I would make the pencils stand out rather than just have a plain background. My first idea was to try and join up the pins as to how the key would look for this lock. However I thought that this distracted too much from the pencils themselves and so abandoned that idea. 

I then thought of using old past papers or textbooks as the background

I felt that these ideas definitely worked better, and then decided to go with past papers as the paper was a little brighter making the pencils stand out. I used a maths past paper as the background as I felt that this contained better imagery and also I had to use a pencil in this exam. 

To display the final piece I found an old decorative box in a second hand shop and it was the perfect size for my piece. I bought it for a couple of punds and then took the old display out, added in my pencils and background. I also tidied up the back of it a bit just to make it looker neater and cleaner.

'Unlocked'

We then had to critique our classmates work and write our questions for them on a piece of papaer. I think that this was a good idea as what came back from mine was that I maybe should have placed my sketchbook there as well to show my progression of ideas, and also explain bits of my concept a bit more. What I might do for next time is next to my artist statement have a QR code that links to a more descriptive blog post that would hopefully answer more questions they might have that I couldn't cover in the artist statement.

Anyway, that's one brief done only three more to go,
bye for now,

Róisín - x