Images from a day making and playing around with materials..

What my work is about...

This is taken from my last learning agreement for the last unit of work for my Fine Art degree..

I am still very much fascinated by the properties of fruit and the different creations I can make with simple techniques and so for this unit I want to produce a body of work which evokes question in the audience about the ideas of ‘improving nature’, life, death, hybridisation, decay and change of form. Using as I have before the everyday popular fruits such as bananas and apples, but with also investigating the more exotic fruit and vegetables available to me. I am still excited in manipulating the fruits, changing skins, playing with the interior and exterior and I am looking forward to using the addition of other materials. I want to experiment with using a cruder more physical reconstruction of combing the fruits, using everyday objects such as drawing pins, elastic bands, bull dog clips, sellotape and sewing methods.

As my work has references to genetically modified food, I will be doing more research into the issues that arise with this subject and maybe see how I can relate these concerns through my work. I would also like to see if I can grow and produce some modified fruits.

With using ephemeral materials I will be documenting the outcomes with photography. I want to push my photography skills and improve on the final images so reproduction is a better quality. I am going to research different styles of printing and I am particularly interested in large scale reproduction of my images, such as billboard sized images.

I am going to give myself short deadlines so I can quickly produce objects and photograph them in a quick turn around because of the nature of the materials. Then once I have some strong images I can play around with reproducing them on different scales.

I will continue to research contemporary art, through the use of books, magazines, the internet and visiting exhibitions. I have recently come across Shen Shaomin, an artist from China who creates fictional creatures made from bones, and I am excited to find more about his practice. Also photographer Jeff Wall, who is known for his large scale back-lit cibachrome photographs has interested me in how he presents his work, so I will research more about him, with also doing more research into artists who specialise in photography, as this is fairly new to me and I have a lot to find out. I need to research different printing techniques and qualities, in the contemporary art world and the professional world. I will continue researching into botanical books and how different hybrids are presented and what types of fruits are available over the world.

Today's ideas using the map pins, elastic bands, drawing pins and bull dog clips. Trying to be more rough with them, less trying to make it a perfect piece and being obvious that it is made by me.

Work from start of a new term. 'Sketchbook ideas' in 3d...

Work after Prelim exhibition.