The Hilarious Creation of the Wooden Armature.

Me and Ruth have been having a few logistical issues recently, we didn't really foreplan about how we're gonna get our pieces to the site. At first when we made the two cats they kept caving in because we hadn't made any support structure for underneath and so we used a LOT of plaster which made it heavy. We are lucky that plaster gets a lot lighter once it is totally dry, so much so that two people can lift it quite easily.


For the other pieces we made sure to build wooden armatures to go underneath the chickenwire and modroc. As much as we're both shockingly bad at DIY (infact we should have sent a film of it off to you've been framed) we managed to make them sturdy which meant we used a lot less modroc, making it lighter and cheaper.


We have also been considering how these pieces are going to be displayed at the exhibition. We know that they do not need a plinth. By sitting something on a plinth you situate it in reality for all to see, but that isn't the point of these pieces. They are items from a dream which are partially still in a dream like form and partially trying to reach reality. We want to work on lighting them from underneath and making them look as if they're creeping out of the darkness into reality, probably sat on the floor, therefore a plinth is completely unneccesary.

Interim Exhibition

I recently visited the exhibition called "Interim" at Vernon Street. We had been given the brochure for the event beforehand and it was very professional. I think that it could be expensive to print that many professional brochures for our event which is why I think it is a cheaper and more efficient to have a website which links to our own pages.

Unfortunatly I didn't particually enjoy the Interim exhibition. I did like a video which was showing in the lecture theatre of a guy painting the lecture theatre black and then white again, it was pretty mind numbing but kept you hooked. The invoice for the work he had done which he had sent to the college was displayed also. I actually took down the artist's e-mail address off the invoice and thought I could add him to the list of people to send the invite to. The more the merrier afterall.

The large amount of steps and echoey rooms seemed to ruin the exhibiton a little bit. I don't think it is a great space for sound pieces because there are too many distractions from it in a nosy, echoey stairway. It is a good spot for 2D pieces and the space is set up to accomodate for that kind of thing.

I saw a performance piece of two twins attached to a rope and when one pulls...the other gets pushed backwards and they were trying to paint a piece of paper different colours. It was rather odd, but then, I never do understand these performance things. I was trying to decide if the actual performance or the piece of painted paper was the actual final piece. The space wasn't very good for a performance, it was so crowded not that many people could fit in that tiny spot, so I guess the painted piece of paper is all that most people would get to see of the whole thing, but does that make it the final piece?

SliceLand

I recently visited another of the "art in unusual spaces" exhibitons in Leeds Shopping Plaza called Sliceland which was organised by students from LCAD, Met and the Uni.

I really enjoyed this exhibition and it made me wish that Stephen had chosen this huge shop as our exhibition venue, especially considering the large work that people are proposing to do.

They had really just worked with the space that was already there, not changing it or freshening it up, just decorating it with cardboard signs and newspaper decorations accross the room. They really had stook to a very low budget but it worked somehow.


They had bands playing, which was something that got me wondering about whether we should have music or some kind of entertainment happening at our private view.

They were very much trying to encourage students from each different art insitute in Leeds to mingle and share contacts etc. They had various comments books, lists for contact details and even badges.

























They even had robots! Ones which you can get inside and move about! I liked.

Playground and On Your Wall

Been meaning to post this for a while, but I visited the exhibitions that were on recently in the Leeds Shopping Plaza where we will be exhibiting. There were two different shows within the 4 shops that we will be using so it was a good opportunity to have a nosy and see how they've done it.

One of the shows was called "Playground". The title was vague enough to link each piece of work in together nicely without being too descriptive of the type of work. I liked the way they had kept with the fun theme for the window display which said the show's name, we need to make sure our window displays are inkeeping with our show name. I thought that it was interesting to have artists working throughout the private view. One man was drawing Xs accross a whole room, another was building a sand sculpture out of a tonne of sand and another artist was drawing from a photograph onto the window.














I found the general atmosphere a bit flat despite the whole "playground" name which suggests a little more excitement, however they had done well to use what was available to them and the use of clip on lights seemed to work well.








The other exhibition was "On Your Wall" which was aimed at people buying the works on display. They did very well to make the place look professional considering how it isn;t designed for this type of occasion. Even their posters and fliers were very professional and carefully considered. The atmosphere was good and there were plenty of drinks flowing.



The use of boards on a stand seemed to work well because it didn't block light and they would be easy to remove after the show, perhaphs this is something we could think about for our exhibition.