April 2014
CONTENT Street Graphics
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Cabinet Of Curiosity 9-16 Earth Artifact 17-22 Type Transcription
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Street Graphics M
ajor cities are in a continuous state of flux caused by building and rebuilding activities and flows of artefacts, goods, commodities, and people, which dissolve and recreate different areas as sites of activity and use. Cities are characterised by tensions between this destruction and reconstruction of spaces, the coexistence of heterogeneous groups, and the different claims upon spaces which they advance and contest. The fusion between the physical form of the city and its social composition promises to help us understand how the question of the city’s identity and differences can become a topic of interest for the groups of persons who inhabit its spaces and who calculate ways and means of practically dealing with these changes. I wanted to approach my first project in the most basic way, which was photography. To know the streets I had to go out and see it with the subject in mind. Everyone in there lives enters the streets, it is part of our daily lives but when do we actually stop to really look
around us. When I was taking the photos, i really wanted to capure a certain light and empty space that created such a scenery that most people wouldnt notice because maybe it’s such a small part such as road signs and paint of yellow lines of the road, but if we were to take it all away would that be such a dramtic difference? I took my series of images of Huddersfield and I experiemented with them on photoshop, playing with the light and contrast, by doing this I really noticed how bright the town is, the small features that were hidden within the architectures. I then came across a singapore based artist Fong Qi Wei who was keen to invent a way to show how scenes change over time, without resorting to a video camera or time-lapse photography. So he captured multiple pictures of the same sites over the course of a day, before splicing them together into a single image taken over several hours.
Fong Qi Wei
JIANG Pengyi
Christopher Boffoli
I found the work of JIANG Pengyi and was amazed and impressed by the detailed sculpture of her work. Jiang’s early works illuminate the rapid development of town planning and architecture in contemporary China as an alternate sampling of capitalization and globalization, and how it excludes and erases all elements of an ancient culture. Inspired I was really fond of miniature buildings and attempted to create my own. I wanted to create my own environment of a town in a variety of perspective, because everyone has different views and opinions of how they see whats around them, what if everything is perfect? Or what if everything was worst? Saturday morning I browsed through the Huddersfiled market in search for anything that would help me create my
miniature buildings and I suddenly came across a bag full of tiny soldiers, the ones you saw in the movie Toy Story. I had an idea to put them in use, instead of creating miniature buildings, what if I brought the soldiers into the big world. I wanted the soldiers to pose around Huddersfield in battle mode to represent all the small chaos that goes on around us in the streets. The miniature people inhabiting the fine art photographs of Christopher Boffoli live in a world of enormous food. A place where towering ice cream cones are turned into camping tents, where a field of peppercorns becomes a soccer match, and a savage crawfish threatens a group of men. The photos are as absurd as they are delightful. Based in Seattle, Boffoli says his work com
ments not only on our fascination with miniature things, but on “the American enthusiasm for excess, especially in the realm of food.” Boffoli’s work was a perfect example and influence of what I wanted to do with the toy soldiers within the streets.
The soldiers became part of me daily routine, I brought them everywhere with me to model on the streets. I really enjoyed it because it was fun to experiment with and have a play around with them. During my experimentation I still wanted to create my own environment for them, so I had started sketching a background the soldiers could stand on. I wanted it to be fun and represent the opposite to what the soldiers did. showing the freedom of the streets, the fun and laughter that also happens with the drama. The two elements would contrast but at the same time combine
Also I tried bringing back my photography into it, I transformed my images into rooms to create a different perspective, I also did this with my sketches and the outcome of both was quite successfull. My final piece became a series of images that involved the toy soldiers in a variety of environment to show the different perspective of society and the street.
Soldier Toy
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Cabinet Of Curiosity T
he ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ was originally a personal collection of things of wonder (the cabinets were also referred to as Wunderkammer - or Cabinet of Wonders).These cabinets reached the peak of their popularity in the 17th Century; they were the personal and often idiosyncratic collections of individual, wealthy owners and contained both natural and man-made objects. The main function of cabinets was to provoke a sense of curiosity and wonder in the viewer; in many ways they represented a world-view that valued the ‘wonder’ in an artefact much more than the need to analyse and classify that artefact. When I recieved this project and read the breif I instantly wanted it to be personal, I wanted to explore back to my childhood and relationships from now, looking deeply into my mind and thoughts. I was curious to the way we think constantly without even realising most of the time and it is interesting how we are always constantly curious
of everything around us especially with people. We question ourselves instantly even if it is the tiniest thing. Our whole life is a big curiosity and we always want to know the answer to everything, always want what we can’t have. I started digging back into my childhood photos, reminiscing about the good and bad days, but what made them good and bad?
“Derive ideas from the world around you, from your own background, from your childhood, from relationships with others, from the social and political environment.� Ken Garland
I printed off all of my history and I wanted to create a series of images of my childhood and the possible thoughts I could of had at the time. So I created layers of images combining it with tracing paper to express my thoughts and feelings. The tracing paper on top of the photos gave the images a foggy effect, as if nothing is actually clear and it worked really well with the message.
After thinking so much about what I thought and what people think, I started to write it all down, creating collages of these words of questions flying about and towards the end I wanted to secure all of my questions within a box but having all the curiosity on the outside. I experimented with all sort of typography to go on the box. I found Aleksander Macasev and was really influenced by his work of type because it was all freehand, his type was scattered, different like someone had just randomly written on it and it was playful. I based my type on the same sort of style because I wanted the writing to look messy and confused. Towards the end my final piece became a bunch of boxes stacked full of hand drawn type of questions that you would find yourself asking to yourself.
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Earth Artifact T
he Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. The Voyager spacecrafts are not heading towards any particular star, but Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light years of the star AC+79 3888 in the Ophiuchus constellation in about 40,000 years For this project I was to imagine what if another life form came down from space, how would I represent earth to them. I found this project to be the most challenging because earth was such an open subject, but I wanted to look at countries and the people because I thought that was what matters the most, the geography and life cycle. I had a variety of ideas that I wanted to experiment. First was to create a deck of cards, almost like flash cards that would
give you information on facts on the earth, or I could apply that idea onto a piece of scroll, at this point I was really focusing on the presentation. I was very much influenced by Welsh artist Ed Fairburn who uses a wide variety of canvases including railroad blueprints, star charts, geological and street maps, he uses additive and subtractive techniques to create portraits that seem pefectly integrated with the topography of streets, mountains and rivers. Looking deep into his work I was inspired by all the mark making of lines, how they carefully create a whole bigger picture and from this I got addcited to drawing lines and circles repeatedly. From this I tried to combine the lines with images of what I thought represented Earth such as nature and humans. I drew the lines and circles with fine liner and I wanted them to show a connection we have on Earth. The circle are meant to form different levels from above which are relevant to mountains,
a representation of layers and levels. The form of circles and lines are to show a flow, I have tried using different shapes and images to see what would work best. I have looked at a variety of artist that have worked within layers and maps for more ideas.
Part collage, part photography, part tapestry, the fragmented interpretations of iconic buildings and landmarks by Seung Hoon Park. Each image begins with 8mm or 16mm camera film strips which he lays down in rows to create a larger surface that effectively acts as a single piece of film. Park then exposes two images in a large format 8×10″ camera using sets of vertical and horizontal strips which are woven together to create a final print. The photographer has traveled to locations around the world including Rome, Milan, Venice and Prague. From this idea I had experimented with my drawings and images and to weave them together, a combination of lines and images mixed together, although the images weaved to-
gether was very appealing, it didn’t work out as well with the lines and I really wanted to include that element. I had developed these ideas by putting it altogether on the computer. I had found another artist that included circles within a scenery of nature and I thought adding shape would bring the image more structure and make it less untidy. Towards the end I made my final piece into a series of images, from my drawings of line and circles mixed with collages from magazines, all scanned in and edited. I wanted to manipulate them and sort of crush them altogether, also creating other ones with simplicity
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Type Transcription I
n one of my workshop I was to create my own characters of the alphabet, I started off by doing simple sketches and different styles of letters. I found it quite challenging because I never really got into typography before in my previous work but I was really excited to experiment. I knew I wanted the characters to be simple and nothing too over the top or dramatic, I got into the habbit of drawing alot of circles and once I kept repeating myself I knew I wanted to work my letters around the circle. The circle would stay the same size, I found it really difficult to make it work with some of the letters, especially the ones that particularly doesn’t require circular shapes. Also problems occur when I noticed that alot of the letters are either too different to one another and it just didn’t connect really well altogether when they all should look like one and a family. When I started working on large graph paper it was much easier to scale everyhting up and to then compare, from
this I found it much easier to fix some of the problems. Some of the letters still took a lot of trial and error because although it might have worked in some ways, it just didn’t look very attraction to look at. After having a final idea of all the letters, I then started to create them on Illustrator, not having a lot of experience on the programme it took me quite a while to get use to but it came together in the end. When I created some of the letters I found again that some of the characters scale was off, although it might have worked well on paper, on the computer I learnt that it still made quite some difference that didn’t work to my benefit. From this I had to go back and change some of my drawings, but I mostly made a few tweaks on the computer because it was easier to compare and much quicker. Finally towards the end I was able to make it work and make it all connect and as a font together.