i did a bit of research on domes, found out that buckminster fuller already thought about a clean air dome, to protect manhattan from the dangers from outside. such as wars or pollution. then i found out about some students designing some domes in a university in california, where the air would be cleaner and purer. i found that approach quite similar to mine, and if i had the materials/money to make it in real life, that would have been similar to that. then i found out that peter macdiarmid made some pollution pods, quite similar in design to mine, to offer a glimpse of global air quality. super interesting. apparently, a few toddlers that went in came back out crying and disturbed.
on the left side here is a small part of the book "speculative everything - design, fiction and social dreaming". i thought the few questions they ask and answer in this short extract were quite interesting since these are the questions that i ask myself. that's a work in progress.
filip dujardin
belgian artist filip dujardin is also an architectural photographer by profession and extends his fascination with the artform through his fictional building series.
most of his architectural creations are structurally implausible, however, seem perfectly ordinary at first glance, revealing their absurdity only as the viewer notices missing or incongruous details. the opus lays claim to his belgian cultural heritage, referencing surrealists such as rené magritte and raoul servais.
his work really struck me when i first discovered it, his way of making naive, unusual and surrealistic architectural projects really made me realize that you can still have an artistic and playful approach to architecture, even with a touch of surrealism. i really like that, i am gonna try to put more of this surrealistic aesthetic into my work, i am wondering how to create these kinds of emotions for the viewer.
roman signer
roman signer is a sculpture, film maker and conceptual artist from switzerland. i found out about his work through the 4d workshop we had today. his approach of photography is very unusual. he sometimes uses explosives for his "action sculptures" or photographs. it really gives us this feeling of being the spectator of a perfectly frozen in time moment. i'm definitely gonna look a lot more into his work, i like the humor we sense in it, i feel like it could relate to my work. i am gonna try some experiments in the next few weeks.
liisa hashimoto
i stumbled open the discovery of japanese artist liisa hashimoto today, after my tutor told me that the project (the ring with a chair on it) i made reminded her of this artist. it was actually a great discovery! i really enjoy her works, it's a lot of miniature chairs and tables that are wearable as a necklace, earrings or else.
she's got quite a naive way to build them i'd say, and i think i have quite a similar vibe going on in my works and drawings. i love the fact that there's a sense of furniture building and building made at a really small scale, in a very imaginative and playful way, it's cute. i sometimes do some pottery with some friends, i am gonna try to make some tiny sculptures of furniture, see where it takes me!
issey miyake
i recently discovered the famous japanese fashion designer miyake a few months ago. his baobao bag with the solid triangles that fold like an origami "shapes made by chance" are kind of everywhere now. he's not an influence to me, but i believe that seeing something many times kind of get in your head, and you're more able to reproduce it without thinking about it. he's really famous for making pleats as well, and after a bit of research, i found out that there are full collections with clothing items where pleats are the main asset. they do look really good, and i like how it brings more depth, beauty and shape to a simple piece of fabric. i recently used this technic in one of the workshops we had last week (26th of september): i had this kind of skirt looking piece of paper and i used this folding technic to make it look like pleats. the end result was really nice, and it gave a notion of movement to it.
charlotte edey @ PUBLIC GALLERY
charlotte edey's first solo show at public gallery was a breath of fresh and smooth air. what i really found interesting in her work was the softness of the color palette and material she uses, most often tapestry and really thin sheets of garment. the subject of this body of work was the femininity. some of her pieces are quite airy, and almost vapory, like this big piece of printed silk, nearly transparent. there was this big handmade tapestry that really stunned me, the centerpiece was this shell, levitating and shining in the middle in all its splendor and all its fragility. i could really sense the notions of osmose between the colors and composition f the elements. it was the representation of the female orgasm and we could really feel it. what i really like about her work is the colors and how she plays with different shapes and object to symbolize something in particular. loving the pastel and pale tones, i might try to work with this kind of palette and see where it takes me. it felt very relaxing to watch and i'd like to explore and replicate that.
juliette ezavin
the first thing that strikes you when you walk into the room is this feeling of being submerged in a nice way by colors, attracted by patterns, almost thrown on top of each other to recreate a wider range of emotions. to try and explain, even rationalise the complexity of human emotions often being in conflict with the instinct of one. and you can feel it. it feels really nice to kind of stop and look at juliette’s work, have a breath of fresh air, see how busy a painting could be, listen to how she describes her reality, think we can relate to it in some aspects of our lives, feel the empathy and know we’re not the only one going through this. yelling out loud what we quietly think. i really like her work, it is honest, full of meaning, and being able to make you feel emotions while just staring at something, this body of work really talked to me in ways i didn’t suspect. at the entrance you’re directly surrounded by these two paintings hanging from each side of the room, facing each other, almost dripping on the floor, like two skyscrapers closing in on you. even though their prestance, variations in color and shape make them utterly unique, they feel pretty identical: the same thought process and work went into these, but the approach was surely different. you can instinctively recreate what you already felt, with the same meaning, but the final outcome will always be something of its own, something that grasped a particular moment. i like this approach of working instinctively, letting the intuition speak for yourself. then looking back at your work and understanding why you did it that way. i am working with this process as well, as with painting or music, and i feel like it's a nice way to let everything out, then step back, analyze and find what the meaning is. it's so powerful and honest. I'll work that way for my extension project and see where it takes me.
vide contemplatif
this painting is called "contemplative void" in french, it came up with the idea of working with less structured forms (as i like to paint with a really neat technique, straight lines and big color blocks). i was trying to work with the notions of instinct and intuition, and for the first time, after a few hours of shaping objects and trying different compositions, i decided to paint over it all, as it was starting to dry. probably inspired by the workshop we did called "revellation of erasure". it was like i was covering my previous work, but let it reveal itself in a way, with the different intensities of the color i made, coming off or staying on the canvas as i was brushing in vertical motions. i liked the fact that it was a rough 2 dimensional pale pink square on 3 dimensional perfectly black square. i like seeing the contradiction of the aspects the colors have with shapes and textures, and how they communicate it through each other.
tom sachs
while taking a break from researching for my extension project, i discovered tom sachs completely unwantedly through a nike advert. the video was about an exploding poncho he created with nike, wearable as a fanny pack. i really liked the idea and went on his instagram page. what i discovered there completely changed the conception i had on being a sculptor and a creative in this field. i could relate to most of his work, a lot of it is witty, clever and funny, sometimes mixing two aspects that shouldn't be mixed together. like nasa and japanese tea making traditions. it really spoke to me and the way he approached a subject really made me think of my thought process. he developed an impressive body of work around sympathetic magic and imitation or altered reality: "not recreating or building the world the way it is, but the way you want it to be." i found that sentence resonating in my head, like if someone finally put words on something i was kind of doing and feeling, but not quite allowing myself to, for some reason. since then i have been having a totally different approach to my personal work and thought process. and being interested in the design and sculptural fields, it felt good hearing his more creative and simpler approach to it. he also mainly works with simple materials, like screws, fabric, wood, and glue guns to create sometimes what shouldn't be made that way (like a handbag) and leaving the glue drips, the pencil marks, the screws on it is something he embraces. letting the materials and the process show. as if they were explaining the work and thought process, the road that led to the final work of art. i love that. as i've always been a diy "repair it if you can - if it's too expensive you can make it yourself" type of guy and seeing his work totally inspired me. i am going to use some of this psychological aspect from what i learned to build my extension week project.
eva hesse
i have mixed feelings about eva hesse's work, and i can't quite pinpoint why. some of her sculptures and paintings are beautiful and really inspiring to me in their simplicity and elegance (no title: the painting, hang up, augh, repetition nineteen III...). some others are very rough, wide and drippy if that makes sense, with a lot going on and some materials i personally don't affectionate like hair, ropes and plastic sticks (no title: the sculpture, untitled, untitled or not yet etc..). it seems a little messy to my eye, i do get the point, but it makes me feel kind of uncomfortable looking at it. still it's simple and sometimes seems unfinished. we've had this conversation in class about how a title for an artwork can be a big deal: sometimes it can really ruin the artwork. well here that's the case. by willingly not giving a title to many of her work, she gives this impression of almost not caring about it and the meaning it has for her. it is probably too nihilistic for me and i don't respond to it really well. i probably don't have enough knowledge in arts to appreciate it. i guess it's like a good wine.
i think it's good to know what you like and don't like in order to know how you apprehend your work in a more personal way.
mona hatoum
i went to see the exhibition at the white cube in bermondsey on sunday. what i really liked about it is the wide range of materials she uses to produce her works. some people say that she has developed a language in which familiar, domestic everyday objects are often transformed into foreign, threatening and dangerous things. her sculptures aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion. and it works pretty well. from hand made tapestries made out of hair, to a luxurious looking neck collar made from fingernails, her work really puts us in a weird atmosphere. what i really like about this exhibition is the series called "remains of the day". it appeared to be some furniture wrapped in chicken wires, then burnt with a blowtorch. it was probably an experiment with the notion of painting with fire, and the way she perfectly wrapped everything in wires made it look surreal. it was like seeing the ghost of an old chair or kitchen table. it was an interesting question raised in terms of what remains after the destruction of something and how it can be still standing after that notion. because a pile of burnt wood would not have the same impact even if we knew what it used to be. seeing these pieces still here, half non-existent, really fascinated me and inspired me to work around these notions. how do we remember what's gone or changed forever?
buckminster fuller & others
richard woods, david shrigley & others
when i first cycled passed it, i knew i had recognized this font and text written on the corner of that building. there was a few huge inviting arrows around the door. it was shrigley's handwriting. i stopped and locked my bike to discover this collaborative exhibition at skip gallery curated by baker & borowsky. the theme was around skips: with their associations of mundanity, disposal and regeneration, skips are ubiquitous but frequently overlooked reminder of our throw-away culture, lending a playfully profound irony to the exhibition of artwork within them. it was super clever. on the pictures i attached you can see sarah maple's work, a pretty poignant statement thrown in a skip, or the one by richard woods: a house grown in a skip, a reflection on hyper-consumerism. the one from shrigley was just this sculptural quote saying « look at this » at the bottom of the skip, witty and clever as always, his sense of humor really influenced me in my work.
hostile architecture
i have been interested in hostile architecture for a few years now, when these started popping out everywhere in the city, on benches, stairways and ledges. as i was skateboarding at this time, i thought they were anti-skate add-ups. most of them weren't. i learned about the fact that it was to prevent homeless people to sleep outside (almost always rough) on stairs, benches or else. knowing that at night most of the benches and ledges aren't used by civilians that have homes where they sleep. some of these architectural bits are even more than hostile, they're crual.
i recently found out, probably a couple of years ago that in vancouver, they started to fight against this weird fashion with these shelter/benches. it provides a temporary dry roof for someone that sleeps rough, with a simplistic solution: a bench with a folding shelter to deploy at night time, and put back in the morning.
is it doing any harm to the people? no.
is it solving a problem in a pacifistic manner? yes.
i don't know how i can do this, but i'll need to figure out a way to have a kind and helpful approach in my work.
alia hamaoui
i met alia when i was at this artist residency called PADA in lisbon a few months ago. her work struck me from the very beginning. i would describe it as sculptural abstract paintings, she describes it as "modern day relic". it's almost always different materials, with a sense of building and painting. pieces develop from an image she'd found or a decision to try out a new material. from building blue print drawings, stills from 70’s documentaries or else.
i went to see the opening of her new exhibition on wednesday in camberwell, beautiful new works, i recommend to anyone reading this to go and check it out. there's an intense yet airy sense of composition in her work that i find quite soothing, the colors are often well-chosen and sometimes make me feel like i am looking at an abstract solid sunset.
(atelier) raphaël garnier
raphaël garnier works with shapes, geometrical or not,a lot of simple and somehow complicated ones. they often communicate with each other to create a satisfying composition. his practice varies from screen-printing, to painting, risography, album covers, types design and sculptures. i love how the shapes he creates belong to him and his universe, either if it's just with a pen on paper, a sculpture or a painting. we can really feel the consistency in his work with whatever media he works with. for example, a few sketches he made give this impression of 20's cartoon drawings, with cross-hatching shading sometimes, and some others are really modern, with color blocks or even just hollow. he's really good at creating 2-dimensional forms or shapes, and bringing them to 3-dimensional structures. most of the time they are tricky, still hollow or flat, but in 3d if that makes sense. raphaël is a french designer, he lives and works in paris. i love this type of work, and since i discovered him, i've learned a lot about his technique and sense of composition. really fascinating.
research on sculpture
a shot from the sculptural research i made. these are small and smooth shapes that interact with each other. they are made out of clay. the grey granite looking clay has a really good rendering, i like how it gives sharpness to the shapes as if they were made out of stone, and are usually forms you wouldn't see sculpted in stone. i liked the idea of it. some of the terra cotta colored bits are quite simple but smooth and presented with some kind of movement, tension or balance. putting them on the granite textured looking ones, and making them look like they are about to fall down was a process i really enjoyed, there is some kind of impossible and dreamy notions in it i'd quite like to explore more. the fact that it is calming colors, with soothing forms and texture, in contradiction with sharp edges, rough and structurly complicated shapes makes it quite enjoyable to look at. i don't know quite what it is yet, if it's the relation between colors or shapes, probably the textures and the tension, i'm gonna work towards that question for a bit and try to explore it as much as i can. maybe with different heights? maybe 2 dimensional for a painting?
roy ascott
here's a work that, even though i knew nothing about until now, really answers the question i asked myself when i was wondering how to make a painting feel 3 dimensional. and roy's work is amazing, i just discovered him, and i can't quite put the words on why, but i know that there's some reminiscences of raphaël garnier in what he does (even though he was around way before him). the smooth shapes he uses, and how he sometimes make them rougher that they are. i like the simplicity of his work and the way it gets playful and creative with the term painting. he used to teach at the ealing and Iipswich art schools in the 1960s, and had an unorthodox and groundbreaking approach to teaching arts. i am gonna try and find some lectures, videos or else on the web to learn more about him, and what he had to offer in terms of teaching.
erwin wurm
what i find fascinating erwin wurm, is the perception of sculpture he has. i'm not gonna talk about the "one minute sculpture" performance he's been running for a year or so, everybody knows a lot about it already. simple concept but really admirable, making the audience take part in a sculpture in order to create it and give it a meaning was quite a good and meaningful idea. what i really like about him is some of the other works he's worked on. for example with the renault R25 sculpture, which is a car where he'd changed the gravitational sense, he wanted to create a visualization of the speed, and probably explore how the wind, the curve etc, could look at a full speed. it gives this weird perspective to the piece, and it's truly well made. i like the way he shifts our notion of reality, almost stretches it and works with it in a really playful way. i'm gonna try to integrate a lot more of this notion in my work and see what can come up.
phillip king
i've started looking up king after reading the brief for my extension project. i like the aesthetic of his work a lot, it's smooth, big, and completely abstract. there's a lot of coherence and consistency in it though. what really inspires me with this artist is the relationship he has with materials (from sand to plaster, fiberglass, wood, steel, paint etc...) and the use he makes of it. it's often really hard to tell what he's worked with, so i uess it's the materials serving the whole project. unlike tom sacks, for example, the process doesn't show in his work, and the rendering is near perfect. another thing that really inspired me is the approach he has to the colors. i read this interview and here what he has to say about it:
"i've always felt that colour was okay for the sculptor to use, as long as it was intended, and arrived at with an awareness of what paint does to the surface. paint conceals a material, but do you have a reason for wanting to conceal it? do you recognize the colour as a skin rather than a painted volume?"
i think these last words really are food for thought, and i consider exploring this approach in my work.
damián ortega - the independent
i selected these two works from damian ortega, from the exhibition he did at the curve. one outcome every day, with the contextualization and thought process that are as fast as the daily news we consume on a regular basis. the first work i selected is this sculpture called ulysses way. a bike with a pile of various household items, furniture and other mixed media. i liked this work at first just for the simple and straight to the point message it gives out. we can really understand the emigration problem: the families having to leave their home with what remains after a flood, often without proper transportation. it is simple, striking and honest. i like this kind of installation.
the second one i liked is this very minimalist work called arsenal’s tiki taka. it represents the movements of a football player on the field. not being a football fan i liked how he managed to create something that actually has some interest at first glance for a large variety of people. it brings up some questions: what is it? what’s at both ends of the string? what does it actually represent? i think this is a clever way to illustrate a subject that’s not as gracious, neat and thin as the artwork.
bertrand fournier
i'm a massive fan of bertrand fournier, and went to his exhibition yesterday eve at Thames-Side Studios .he's a french painter that started painting in his garage, with no experience or knowledge in arts. it was just a nice and simple hobby he had a few times a week. a peaceful moment. after a few shows and instagram posts, he blew up and got his name in really nice galleries around the world. there's still a lot of people wondering how he got there so fast. his work is clean, clever, with straight lines, simple shapes and color palettes. abstractly figurative if i can say? after staring at one of his paintings for a few minutes, trying to figure out what it could be, cause it seems abstract but there's this hint of figurative, your mind starts to find some sort of familiar shapes from the everyday life. it's super playful. then you read the title on the card next to it and find out that what you saw was sometimes right, it's easy as this. i got super inspired by bertrand fournier when i first started painting a few months ago. i loved the naive approach he had to something that is really complicated and discussed all over the world. art. not really caring about what people would say. just doing his thing. an inspiration.
bruce m. sherman
i discovered his work recently while searching on the internet, i'm not sure if i can qualify that as sculpture or ceramic, but i'm pretty certain it's both. sherman was a dentist back in the days, and stopped everything to fully devote himself to his art. there's something really unconventional to his approach to sculpture: i like the fact that it is bits of clay, then painted and glazed. it gives this very neat but naive work and i love it. i like the fact that on some of the sculptures, the glazed texture really reminds me of a ceramic bowl or plate. i need to see one of his shows the next time he's in london, i think it will be truly inspirational.
"When you cut into a tooth, which seems very inert, it’s actually a living thing, as is clay" he says. it's a wise thought.
i like how he adds some other elements, like cacti or rocks, just to put a final touch to it when it's needed, and it really gives a nice finish. i like the choice of colors as well, they're often well chosen, and seeing a few pictures of his shows online with all the pieces together brings a lot of colorful energy and spark in the room.