Exhibitions

It was quite cool to see everyone elses work up at the other venues, and the ones I visited included Kraak gallery, Hilton House, The Bay Horse pub and Cord bar. This is a selection of the work I saw; I particularly liked the sculptural work at Nexus Art cafe, the zines created by the graphics students and the photos of the colour festival that some of our group took part in.



Project overview

This is the blurb I wrote about our work to put up alongside our work with a list of names. I feel it sums up the project pretty well.

"An exhibition of collaborative work celebrating the diversity of culture in Manchester as the Art School reaches its 175th anniversary. Bringing together photographs, prints, illustrations and objects which individually explore different geographical areas of the city, collectively it represents how the variety in culture makes Manchester the vibrant, exciting place it is.
As a group of students from various backgrounds, we individually studied our cultures and hometowns before reflecting this back on the city we all now live in. Each group member took an area of the city to explore and used this as inspiration to create their own artworks, with many group members experimenting with mediums outside of their specialisms.

Various areas brought up different themes: the bright colours and textures of the Longsight markets led to photographs inspired by Pakistani wedding traditions, decorated mugs and bunting were a reflection of the vintage and café culture in the Northern Quarter, and prints and illustrations were influenced by the traditional architecture of Deansgate, Oxford Road and the Art School itself. Students also looked at concepts of childhood family photographs envisaged through their friends, physical differences through ethnicity and imagery taken from walking around the city streets.

All this individual work was brought together as one collaborative display, with group members hanging works side by side, layering artworks over each other or even creating origami out of each others photographs, to create a bold, vibrant and visually exciting exhibition of clashing mediums, styles, colours and scale that truly celebrates the amazing diversity of this city we all now call home."

Final work

I was really pleased with how the final work looked up. My favourite has to be the collaboration I did with Jess, and I'm so happy we picked this space for it, as the bluey grey plaster perfectly ofsets the dusty orange reds of Jess's colour palate. It was also good to see how the public interacted with our work, as our exhibition space is a bar/restaurant.

Liked the reflections as I tried to get a photo of my work through the window.



Putting up work - day 2

Our second morning was really productive and we managed to successfully get everyone's work up, despite a lot of issues with crumbling mortar and wonky walls. It was good to finally see all of our work up together in one space and everything gelled perfectly.

First prep session

 We had our first prep session to see where everyones work would go between 8 and 10 in the morning, and Nicola and Hannah came to help us make decisions around displaying our work. We came to the conclusion that our work looked better mixed up than it did all separately (which had been our original choice as the wall is made up of uneven alcoves and chimey-breasts). We decided collectively that my work actually looked better in the middle of the wall, surrounded by Samira's mugs and bunting. As I had printed my designs on accetate, it turned out that mine and Jess's prints looked really nice layered together beside the window as a collaborative piece.

Howard helped Jess and I visualise our work on the wall, and in the studio everyone helped us to select the final works for the next day. After our morning at Terrace, it was really useful to go into town and have the rest of the groups opinion on which frames to buy.

 

Prep meeting

On the Monday afternoon before putting up our work on Tuesday morning we had to have a tutorial with Nicola and Hannah. There was much deliberation over what work should and shouldn't go up, but as a group we finalised our original plan of whose work was going where. We came to the decision to put up our work as is, held up with bulldog clips and nails as we can only hammer nails into the mortar. I'm pleased with how we dealt with the site specific issues as a group.

Decision on Terrace

After hanging around for an answer for what felt like weeks, we finally found out that we had Terrace bar as our venue, shared with three other groups. The meeting at the space with media tutor Adriano was slightly frought, with tensions running high among the other groups (and a fair bit of bickering). But our group took a slight step back, and we were pretty sure which section of wall we wanted. It was good to finally know how much space we had so we could visualise which work to put up, although it would have been nice to have found out earlier as it was quite stressful knowing I only had Friday and the weekend to get everything sorted.

Part of the team

Working as a group

I feel so lucky to have ended up with a group that gets along so famously, and creating work with everyone has been so enjoyable. As the project has gone on we have become really good friends, which means that everyone appreciates everyones opinions and has useful advice to offer on all areas of project work. As we near the deadline we have been having increasingly frequent meetings, but also we all speak to each other on a daily basis through facebook chat as part of a running commentary. We were slightly nervous about our presentation, but it went really well and it was useful to get feedback from Julie and the other revolt groups.

Drawings

Among all our meetings about how everyone's work is going, I have been getting along with my drawings based on my photos of the art school. Here is a shot of my work and my working space in the studio.

These are some of the smaller motif style drawings from the book I have been continously working in. These four are my favourite as they really hit the bold, graphic style I was going for.

Leigh Cooke

This was such an interesting, intense three hour talk with the Hermes designer Leigh Cooke. It was incredible to hear his background story before the lead up to his current job. I thought it was interesting to see how much his work has developed since his degree, and also the entire process of selling his work to fashion houses. What I liked the most about the talk was not just that he was such an interesting character, but that he questioned every method of working I have ever been taught, and he left me with a totally different view of textiles print design.  I found it really relevant because the work he does is ultimately what I would adore to one day be doing, and I left the talk totally itching to go and work. I future projects I definitely want to try creating a print for square scarves.

Close-ups of Cooke's famous A Vos Crayons design

Venues



As Julie gave us a list of possible exhibition venues in the northern quarter, we split up the group and Niamh, Mariam and I went to have a reckie of the venues whilst everyone else covered the various lectures. It was interesting to see what spaces were available and was a good begining point to make us think about how our individual work could fit together as an exhibition. We really liked Nexus Art cafe as they had a really cool window space that we felt we could make a collaborative 3D piece in, along with plain walls that we could display individual work on. Our back up choice would be Terrace bar, which was moodily lit, had textural open brick walls and just generally had a really good vibe to it.

My notes from the walk

Art school

As we are supposed to be looking back at the art school anniversary, I decided I would look at the architecture of the art school buildings as inspiration for my drawings. So I went out looking specifically at interesting and detailed architectural details.

Developing themes

Everyone had been so busy with their own work that we hadn't had a meeting for quite a while. I think this is where facebook has its benefits, as we message each other daily on chat, but some of us were getting exasperated that we hadn't physically seen anyones work for a bit so we arranged a meeting, which was so beneficial for everybody. A few group members had been toa tutorial the day before where we informed that we had to bring the project back to celebrating the art school anniversary.

After pooling our ideas we decided that a good way to move on from culture was to look at culture in the city, and we divied up areas of Manchester for each person to explore, with a plan that everyone would have a week to research their area and create artwork before meeting up to see how this could be brought together as a collaboration.

Plan of everyones allocated areas

 

Print fair

Went to an amazing print fair at 2022NQ in the northern quarter. There was loads of interesting stalls and artworks, and it was buzzing with creative people. I found it really inspiring to see fresh new artworks and also how they applied their designs (zines were very popular) and there were so many interesting designers, makers and artists that I think what I picked up on most was the general style and limited colour palates. I had been wondering how to move my work forward, but it helped to clarify that I'm very happy with the current graphic style I'm using, so I think I'm just going to push it further.

Phillipe Petrament

Stumbled across this artist's work and I really like the way it collages together different banknotes to create one image. This fits in really well with my currency drawings as I was trying to combine different motifs and symbols from pennies and combining them as a single illustration.



Poster

Our first proper meeting after the holidays was at Hilton House where we had to create a poster to show how our project was getting on. It was interesting to see what everyone had been up to and created, and to get some positive feedback on my own work. We created a busy poster that brought together elements of everyones work from the previous two weeks.

Northern Quarter Safari

Despite getting absolutely soaked as it decided to chuck it down as soon as we set off, I really enjoyed this tour of the northern quarter with fashion tutor Louise. It was amazing to find out all about the history of certain buildings and the area generally and it was interesting to have a good old wander around Ancoats - it made me realised how little of the Northern Quarter I have seen past Oldham and Thomas street. Below are photographs of some of the most interesting bits.

I've always followed the lomography website, so I loved seeing the Lomography wall. Covered in hundreds of film photographs, it just has this great presence due to the scale, and the images themselves have weathered really well.

I really liked these enormous panels showing interior photographs of delapidated cotton mills, an interesting play on what the northern quarter was originally built on.

I also liked the little quirks you could spot here and there, that you might just walk past unless someone stopped and pointed them out to you, such as the amazingly graphic gold sign of this boarded up pub and this lit up artwork set into the wall.

Also part of the tour was a trek up to Cheetham hill to visit a trimming wholesaler, which was textiles heaven! Could have bought so many things that I didn't actually need, but it will be an extremely useful resource for the future.

Light experimentation

I spotted sunlight shining through objects on my windowsill in an interesting way, so I thought I would see how it looked over my drawings. I like the weird effect and think because of it I might consider other ways to incorporate colour into my work, as solid colour can sometimes make eveything appear a bit flat.

Holiday work

Before the Easter break we had a group meeting to discuss where to go next, and decided that we would take this theme of currency and culture and see where it took us in our individual ways, and then after the holiday we would be able to bring our work together and discuss our direction.

It was during one particular day whilst I was away from home with nothing to do that I decided to start drawing what I had on me, and this soon developed into a little sketchbook specifically for illustrations and drawings. My starting point was bank notes and looking at the close details that you never usually notice.

These were all details taken from a £5 note.

Here I started to look at foreign coins, and introduced a single bold colour.

I particularly like these two as they are simple but work rather effectively.