Laser Cutter and Wall Piece Development

So today I went to cut some stuff with lasers and what not. It was a roller-coaster of emotions ranging from giddy delirium brought on by the initial novelty of the whole facade right down to life ruining horror at the realisation of how insanely naive I have been to pile myself with so much work.

First things first - sessions are only an hour long. It's a good fucking job me and Claire shared two hours between us cos we'd have been all over the place otherwise. I decided to start with a test frame cut out of mount board, only about 25m or so high, fairly small. There's me thinking that the test piece we all got in the induction was cut out so quickly therefore everything will be cut out at super speed and the world will be a good place. WRONG. Holy shit. It took like 50 minutes to cut out this tiny fucking frame that I'm not even going to use in my final thing anyway since it's only a trial. I HAD IMAGINED CUTTING AROUND TEN OR SO FRAMES OF VARYING SIZES. Jog on Gauntley, you're a mentalist.

This in turn leads on to the 'there are physically not enough hours in the day to get this done' issue, which, as suggested by the not at all exaggerated title, is proving slightly problematic. Sessions are only one hour long. You can only book one session per day. There are only 3 more working days left to complete this. THREE. From this, I have derived that 10 cut outs is perhaps a tad ambitious and I should be thankful if I manage to come out with even three in the time I have. Wonderful.

However, I am clinging to this tiny but of hope with all of my being: since Friday was a test run there are things to be learned. For instance, the Illustrator files that I had can be streamlined immensely. The way I created them was to draw my frames on paper, scan them in and live trace them - which I assumed would give me my line drawings but it turns out that the live trace had taken every line, traced around the edges of it and turned it into an object itself - so essentially the laser cutter had to go round everything an extra time. By my calculations, rectifying my files will create half the number of lines resulting in it taking half the amount of time. Logic. Just means a good few hours sitting and deleting every individual anchor point on the drawings.. Mint.

So now I'm thinking that since I have 5 different frame types illustrated I can try and aim to get one of each cut out over the space of 3 hours. I am literally praying - I never resort to religion, dark times.

It could be worse - Claire's work set on fire a little bit, it was heart breaking.

On the bright side though, despite having said I wouldn't need the frame until Tuesday it is now comfortably in my life and it is sweet as a fucking cashew nut. Brilliant news. The guy is incredibly nice and he knows my naaaaame! I hate feeling like just a random stranger pestering for help but I felt like a 3d master by the end of the day - lovely old job.

For my wall piece I've decided to paint my frame white. The cut outs are going to be from white mount board and I want it to be purely about the depth element, not any mark making. So by painting the chunky wooden box frame and also the bed of the frame white I'm maintaining the continuity and not distracting away from the intended effect of my idea.

History of the frame in Art

Cassetta Frames - Commonly used in the Renaissance, cassetta frames are box like and incorporate linear or floral patterns which are often painted gold or adorned with gold detail.

Mannerist Frames - Incorporated exaggerated organic architectural forms. Frames from different countries reflected the major movements of the time eg. Norther mannerist frames were influenced by anatomical discoveries and Spanish frames by extravagant sculptural features.

Cabinet-Makers Frame - Made of stained or polished wood and reflective of those with furniture making skills. At the time, in Britain, they were mainly used to house tapestries and other fabric pieces.

Baroque Frames - Gilded frames with heavily laden curls of leaves and shells in the corners and centres of each rail. Artists often used the embellishments of the frames to plan the compositions of their paintings by drawing imaginary lines between each of the frames focal points - these imaginary lines would be where the eye is automatically drawn to when looking at the frame.

Rococo Frames - Much like baroque but a lot more delicate and curvaceous. Developed from a trend in French architecture and interior design rococo frames were magnificently ornate and used to house the most regal of paintings.

Palladanian Frames - A masculine and architectural progression from rococo, often with a bold, angular silhouette and decorated with classical geometric patterns.

Salvator Rosa Frames - Another linear style, similar to cassetta but incorporating the sculptural profile of baroque - these could be either plain or progressively rich.

Neoclassical and Empire Frames - Another reaction against the extravagance of the rococo style and also influenced by a trend in excavations and antiques. These were the first mass produced frames and from that point onwards the frame was less a work of art and became more a cheaply produced object to house popular art.

Framing

I've been thinking about my wall piece quite a lot recently and some of the practical aspects are proving problematic. I've got this amazing image in my head of what it's going to look like but I just didn't realise just how much work would be involved to actually make it work.

My main problem is finding a frame. I did originally consider simply having the cut outs elevated from a piece of mount board but the more I thought about it the shitter it seemed - the edges would be messy and you'd be able to see the construction a lot more, there's no thought behind it really. Then my plans moved onto acquiring a deep frame. It would automatically look more professional and the glass would provide a physical separation so that the methods of elevation would be less noticeable to the audience.

But college don't have any deep frames, and to try and locate one of the correct size within the next few days is just unrealistic and incredibly expensive. All the cool kids are raving about this new thing, I think they call it initiative? Yeah so I thought I'd jump on that bandwagon and give it a shot - I've got to admit I was on the fence about the whole thing at first but so far it's not been too shabby. Brace yourself.... I'M MAKING MY OWN FRAME. Boom. Thank you, and goodnight.

Yeah I feel so productive! Went and paid my friend on 3d design a visit and he introduced me to the technician, who by the way is a saint although I don't know his name and feel quite bad. Told him what I wanted and when I wanted it by and then I was sent on my merry old way! Ahhhh productivity is definitely the way forward.

129 Exhibition - Curation Meeting

Team Curation got the ball rolling today with a highly productive hour (more like two) of discussion. By the end of it we actually came out with some sort of image in our heads of how it's all going to work, albeit quite vague. It also really hit home just how much you have to take into consideration when curating an exhibition. Here are some of the issues we covered:

• running with the 'salon style' but keeping the area of hung work at eye level so that each individual receives an equal amount of emphasis.
• poster/flyer designs were shown and we discussed relevant places to post them and also apply signage
• incorporation of the current 'welcome' vinyl into a possible illustration piece done by Tom
• layout - most of the arranging of work will have to be done on the day when everyone has submitted their exhibition pieces.. that's gunna be fun..
• structure - at the minute the plan is to shrink the smaller studio by building a temporary wall down the centre, we also need to confirm whether anyone requires a small dark room building for light art.
• clarification of what is actually required from students: 1st years - book and postcard; 2nd years - postcard, one wall mounted piece OR 30 clip for showreel, and collections book project if finished (could be in the form of a book/wall piece/video etc); 3rd years - postcard and one wall mountable piece.
• inclusion of postcards - try and exhibit all of the main pieces in the larger studio and keep the smaller one solely for postcards to be exhibited in an interesting way - hanging? continuous line?
• what to do with spare furniture - possibly move into the graphics room opposite
• labeling work - each students work will be labelled with their name only, guests will be handed a print out with students names in alphabetical order alongside their year, contact details and website. Highlighter pens placed throughout the exhibition for people to make notes about work they like.
• interactive element - the map feature in the corridor, constant rotation of approx 10 greeters to explain the concept and guide them through the exhibition
• content to be included on the idents for the showreel
• presentation of work - students to hand in their work how they intend it to be presented, eg. frames, mounted etc.

I'm fairly positive there was so much more than this but I can't for the life of me remember it all, I'm sure it will come to me. Even though I know I'm willingly creating so much more work for myself I'm really glad I'm involved; it gives us a head start when it comes to our graduate exhibition and I do genuinely believe that I'm picking up some pretty useful skills.

Day Tripping to London

Paul managed to wangle us free tickets to London Art Fair 2010, so we made a command decision to day trip it - despite having no real interest in fine art. I'm not going to lie, when I said I'd go I did not have the visual language brief in mind, I just like visiting random places. But when we were there it was sort of 'hannnnng on a second.. THIS IS CURATION' and, boom, there it was, the deep learning began.

Again, I won't lie - I was more than moderately hungover so although I did try my best to link together what I was seeing with my projects, my main priority throughout most of the day was staying alive, not feinting and trying not to let too many people smell me. I really did try though, honest.

First observation - the Business Design Centre in Islington is HUGE. Literally once you were in there trying to locate the exit amongst all of the temporary walls was like trying to unearth Narnia in the bedroom section of an MFI warehouse. The space itself was insanely big, and then it had an extra 3 floors on top of that spreading across what must have been best part of the building.

There was definitely some pretty cool stuff floating around but a lot of it was really fine art-y and I'm just not into that - I did take pictures of things that I saw and went 'oooh that's very viscom' - I'll upload them shortly.

It wasn't until after we'd left that it sort of dawned on me just how relevant that experience actually was.. Despite being on an immensely bigger scale, the art fair bore many similarities to our 129 exhibition. The fair encompassed well over 100 individual galleries coming together to showcase the art they had to offer. The exhibition space had to be divided so that each gallery was given an equal amount of wall space but in a way that made the divisions between each gallery clear (not directly linked to the salon style of 129 but certainly to the graduate and end of year exhibitions). After taking part in the curatorial side of our own exhibition I'm struggling to fathom just how many decisions had to be made for something this mammoth. I did notice though, that the many of the curatorial aspects within each gallery space had been left up to the gallery themselves - it looked as though they were free to do what they chose with the space they were given but there were common threads such as the white walls running throughout.

It completely crossed my mind to look at the fixtures, I'd be interested to know if they were standard throughout. However I don't think they would have been.. It's a temporary exhibition with the aim of selling work, so in theory that would mean that it should be easily removed from the wall if someone chooses to buy it, and also, most galleries seemed to have brought more artwork than they had wall space and were rotating the pieces on display during the course of the day so I'm taking a stab in the dark and saying that wherever light enough canvases and smaller frames were hung on nail and string? It was obvious that some of the larger pieces were a lot more definitive in their presence and had to be secured thoroughly, but logically I would have thought that something like mirror brackets would have been impractical for the purpose of the fair.

I also forgot to take a gander at the labeling - however I did read a lot of the labels and my current thought process is that I would have noticed if there was major in-continuity which suggests to me that they were all pretty standard. To be fair there's not that much controversy you can cause with label design as far as I'm aware.

Oh, and Paul is sure he saw Bill Bailey. I was sleeping with my eyes open so I missed him.

So that was looking at constructing a temporary exhibition in something that is not fundamentally a gallery space, a.k.a. Viscom. We then decided (after a few hours in Camden) to visit the Tate (mainly for the bookshop but we did then decide it would be a wasted journey if we didn't look around), a permanent exhibition space designed specifically to exhibit artwork. I think a comparison is in order.

Again, I didn't realise the relevance of all of this at the time so I'm analysing entirely from memory.

The main apparent difference is that the finishing in the Tate was impeccable - as you would obviously expect. The exhibition style (in the free galleries, I can't speak for the one that I apparently had to pay to criticise) was somewhere in between that of salon and individually hung. They were mostly hung at random heights - eye level or above - in what appeared to be (but evidently wasn't) a haphazard way, but the spacing between each piece was quite vast. Because the ceilings are so high as well I can't really work out what I made of it to be perfectly honest.. I don't think I liked it much.

I can't remember what colour the walls were but I do know they weren't white - I'm fairly sure there was some sludgy greeny/grey involved? I could be mistaken, I should really have paid attention to these things. Either way it worked well, the decision to plaster everything in white would have totally sterilised the entire space due to the insane amount never ending walls, it would have looked very hospital/mental asylum-esque. This way, it felt a little bit more homely.. as homely as the Tate can be - it was warmer and more welcoming.

I don't really know what else to say about the Tate. I'm not a massive arty-farty person; if something is obviously good I'll appreciate it, but if someone has just smeared a load of red paint into a half chewed piece of paper then chances are I'm not going to give a crap, and unfortunately the majority of the content was in fact the latter. I'm glad I went, I hadn't been before then but will I be traveling an 8 hour round trip on a coach to see it again? No, jog on.

Death bed aside, I had a good day and, if anything, my suffering provided Paul with mild entertainment, everyone's a winner.

A step in the right direction..

Today me and Claire booked ourselves in for the laser cutter. We have two consecutive hours that we plan on sharing next Friday afternoon to work on our wall pieces. I instantly feel better. Now that I have an actual time slot it means that I have to get the templates done by then and if I get my frame shapes next week that means I have 6 whole days to put the piece together in time for the exhibition - job's a good'un.

I don't think it will take me that long to get the frame templates drawn up - no more than a day or so, meaning in between then and the cutter session I can work on my postcard idea as well.

Aside from that I've been doing some serious consideration regarding the Vogue illustrations and their place in the exhibition and I've done a complete U-turn. The salon style display was a very specific vision in my head and I just don't think I'm going to be able to pull it off to the standard I would have liked - two weeks just isn't enough time to find a varied enough range of frames at prices that I can afford (seeing as large-ish frames can cost at least £20 each). There is also the issue that David has now decided that the whole exhibition is going to be salon style so my work - which was intended to be an individual salon display in the midst of evenly spaced work - just won't have the impact that I initially hoped.

My plan now is to create a good quality leather display box to present my drawings in. Each page will be of equal size and will be larger than the magazine size so that you can see the confinements of each page and can respond to it more as a drawing of an object rather than a model, which is the point I'm largely trying to make. I want my 'book' to be a documentation of how I see Vogue - when I look at a page, what is it that I see?

I have also made the command decision not to rush trying to get my book completed in time for the exhibition - I'd rather use the extra week and be able to say that I completed it to the best of my ability, than to have to spend that week saying 'ahh I wish I'd done this and this differently, it would have looked so much better'.

What this does mean though - and I'm completely gutted about this - is that I don't plan on using my second drawing in my final book. Or at least, I won't be able to use the original as the paper is the exact page size with no border. It may be the case that I scan in my drawings and print them out again so I can produce more than one final book but so far any scanned pencil drawings have lost a lot of their initial charm when they've been reproduced so it may be worth a trip to the digital print room to see what can be done.

Viscom Illustration Exhibition

LOOK AT ME BE ON A WALL!!

Feels pretty good.