Life Drawings

Some life drawings I did a while back in preparation for the project "I Never Called You Darling"

Love

NM, Collage, 2012, Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia

Made from a collection of miscellaneous stamps found at a Sydney market.

Finishing Line

The finishing line is ever so close for the end of my degree and aptly the theme of our degree show is going to be 'on your marks' interpreted in many different ways, the class of D&AD 2010 are playing on the idea of a design olympics. As we are all about to leave university and enter the professional world, it is time to 'make our mark' on the design world. Get regular updates and info by following @onyourmarks2011, Twitter page


I will be adding my final projects to my website shortly, but for now here is a snapshot of my workings

Three Fork Road

So I have been scrupulously working towards finishing my exploration into the Beat Generation... I posted a couple of weeks ago the stage I was at. My aim was to give, On The Road, Howl and Naked Lunch, their own sense of a clear definable identity...

Three forks...

---------On The Road---------

----------Naked Lunch ---------

---------- Howl -----------

Still so much to do, but determined to crack this in the next few days

Sarah@OWT creative, travelling sketchbook

I thought I would post up some photographs of some pages I have contributed to Sarah Stapleton's travelling Sketchbook. The idea is to send a sketchbook on a journey and see how different people respond/reject/embrace work within the sketchbook and make their own mark in it before passing it on. Here are my contributions, I have tried to keep the pages quite light and leave lots of space, to encourage others to add to my pages with their work.

If anyone would like to be the next contributor, let me know!

My Life At Present

I decided to pin up all the different aspects of my Beat Generation Project, in order to see where I was with it and assess the next step. So far I have created a book, posters and pamphlets, which amalgamatee my visual responses to Naked Lunch (Burroughs), Howl (Ginsberg) and On The Road (Kerouac). Attempting to throw these three, very different, creations together into one proved very difficult, but I am happy with the imagery I created. I have most certainly succeeded in creating a 'personal' response to the poems, however, now I would like to look upon the material objectively and try to give each piece a unique identity. My final outcome will hopefully express a clear identity for each of the three pieces, allowing the three to be grouped together without causing confusion. For my personal response I like the chaotic, confusing and spontaneous aspect to the work, so I would like to now refine what I have to make something interesting, conceptual and also coherent.

Sam Meech Workshop

I was asked to joined the second year film workshop, which was ran by Sam Meech. I had completed a project in second year which used found film to map out the song, Heroin, the Velvet Underground. I felt like this workshop was ideal for me to return to moving image and get my hands on some archival footage courtesy of the North West Film Archive.

In the first session, Sam wanted to see how we each responded to the same set of ingrediants in different ways. therefore he oddly brought in a wide selection of fruit and veg and asked us all to make our own smoothies, this was really enjoyable (and healthy) and despite my huge aversion to beetroot, my smoothie turned out nicely.

Then it was time to apply this technique to film, Sam gave us each the same set of film clips, selected from the archive, the rest of the workshops were spent manipulating and amalgamating this footage using the skill sets Sam had given us. Each person showed their unique work in progress. I experimented with female and male gaze, here is the film, which I will most likely continue to develop

...

Mad To Live

Here is a coverless mock up of the publication I have been creating, based around The Beat Generation. The book contains extracts from Allen Ginsberg's Poem, Howl, William. S. Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch and Jack Kerouac's novel, On The Road. I wanted to create imagery, which provoked my interpretation of the mood and attitude around the Beats, without being obvious or cliched. This may stay as a 9" x 6" landscape book, perfect bound, but i am also going to explore larger formats, edited formats alterntive directions for the material...(to be continued)

Open publication - Free publishing - More burroughs

Idle Progression

I have been collaborating over the past few weeks with Alice Smith and The Idler Magazine. We have been illustrating an essay by Sarah Boak called 'Idling for Women,' The essay addresses a lot of themes in regards to society's attitudes towards women. Some themes include: health, beauty, fashion, advertising, mass media, social expectations, politics, the essay offers women an idle alternative to the continuous stretching and pulling of feminine identity. More about this to come soon...

courtesy of Captain Geoffrey Spaulding

Elle Interview

When the opportunity arose for a placement at ELLE magazine, I felt it was a chance I couldn't miss. Lewis Cham, an ex-student from the course, offered a four week, paid placement in London. After working with Flux I really enjoyed the process of seeing a magazine develop from start to finish and thought it would be a great experience to do the same with ELLE magazine.

I sent a digital PDF of my work along with my CV and got a callback from Lewis, asking to come to the ELLE office for an interview. The interview was such short notice that I had to overhaul my portfolio and re-photograph my work in 24 hours, ready to take it down to London.

Upon meeting Lewis I felt instantly relaxed as he was very laid back and took hold of my portfolio and began flicking through it. He really engaged with my work and gave me some great feedback. I did feel however that the position wasn't quite right for me, as I got the sense that a huge interest in fashion was a main criteria, and many of my references and inspirations came from outside of fashion, as I explained I felt this was a good way to avoid repeating things that had already been done.

I felt like preparing myself for the interview and meeting Lewis was a positive experience and I learnt a lot about how to present myself, I think it can only be a good thing to show your work to as many people as possible, who may never have seen it, in order to gain confidence in presenting work and refine my presentation technique. It was really encouraging to get good feedback and even though I was unsuccessful in getting the placement, I think that the position was perfect for Phoebe Sing, who did get it, and I'm sure the experience complimented her interests and portfolio immensely, Well done Phoebe!

The Young Creatives

'The Young Creatives' is a blog, which showcases creative talent and shares inspiring and critical content to do with the creative industries. Check out my interview on the blog here

Grafik Feature

A while back, I was set the brief to Re-Brand 'God' by TDR, Creative Director, Ian Anderson. Myself and a group of designers from my course were asked to communicate our concept for a poster design, which had the possibility of being featured in the re-launch of Grafik Magazine. Grafik magazine re-launched on 10th February and I was absolutely ecstatic to find out that my poster had been featured along with Sophie Pickup, Danny Grogan, John McPartland, Rebecca Dudgon.

Thanks to Ian Anderson & Grafik Mag.

Link to original iGod Post

OWT Exhibition

Every month OWT creative produce their own zine, based around a single word. Northern creatives are invited to submit work based around the word. Four zines have been created so far; Beginnings, Reflections, Reality and Direction.

The work from zines 1-4 has recently been carefully curated into an exhibition, which is currently showing at Cord Bar, Manchester. The opening was held last Thursday, 10th, February. Each piece of work was beautifully framed and is available to purchase. The night was a huge success and upon arriving I couldn't believe the amazing turn out, clearly an immense amount of planning and organisation had gone into the exhibition and it certainly paid off. There were so many great pieces of work to be seen as well as a projected 'zine,' which combined slides brought by guests at the event. The atmosphere was incredible, I had a really great night, so well done to everyone involved and especially the OWT team, also big thanks for featuring my work, can't wait for the next zine, which is incidentally based around the word 'Atmosphere'

You can submit work for the next zine by sending submissions to submit@owtcreative.com

visit the the OWT website here

OWT Contributors

My submission for OWT 4

Russell Hopkins, Nina McNamara

Projected zine

Amy Minto

my favourite piece, by Ben Kither

I Never Called You Darling

Female Erotic Fragments

I have been exploring erotic fiction and feminist writings as part of my university course. I have been writing my own story-poems from written fragments by Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Pauline Réage (Anne Desclos) etc. As I was using fragments of text I felt it appropriate to use fragments of imagery to illustrate this text. I created a series of Montages, which I then collected within a small book along with the story-poems.

I also made some limited edition cards and envelopes to accompany the book or to stand alone.

STATIC

Static;

inert, motionless, stagnant, stationary, immobile, fixed, constant, changeless were a few words to trigger the ideas process. When I considered further I thought about ideas of interference and interruption, at first in a conventional sense, but what if interference and interruption were applied to something else.

Four key words describe my interpretation of static.

Interference

Routine

Possession (s)

Influence.

How could I interfere with a step by step process, perhaps removing a step or interrupting a step. Shaking the printer whilst it was printing, moving an image whilst it was scanning, drawing something, perhaps rubbing it out DeKooning-style. I began taking photographic slides and interfering with the developing process. Scratching the slides, obstructing with shapes, covering faces with fish net, drawing pins and electrical tape. Even removing the film altogether and creating photo-grams from my belongings.

From interference I began to look at influence. How an influence can be an interference within someone’s life. Everyone is exposed to millions of different influences. Another type of interruption of process, the process being our lives. I wanted to map my own influences, painstakingly attempting to collate everyone who's ever influenced me. I decided to hone in on artistic influences and then eventually feminine influences, mapping each woman who has inspired me and trying to smash and collide these images together to create an amalgamated female form

I thought about what it is that makes up a person, routine being one aspect, influences being another and I felt that personal possessions were important also, I explored my purse containing ephemeral things that make up a person day to day, ever changing collections of receipts, scrap of paper, stamps, copy cards etc. Things that were material yes, but also individual and bespoke to a person. No two purses would ever be the same.

I thought about how routine can be something static, people develop a living pattern, have rituals, obsessions, these can be quite mundane things, I thought about how I could map my own routine, instead of it being mundane, it would have a new context and perspective, allowing me to re-think and analyse.

I needed a way to bring all of these these themes together in one coherent way, I decided on the idea of a book-box format. The box resembles an expander file, hinting at the archival nature of the contents, and inside each word is represented by a separate entity of beak book, each book has a definition of the word and my response.