the big pink chair frame in the middle of the room

as the project is coming to an end I find myself wanting to carry on and take it as far as I can but I also feel quite relieved and very excited to start the electives. Over all the first semester was a lot of fun and I learned a lot from just being allowed and even encouraged to fool around with different materials and being given room to make my own mistakes. The whole idea of working out ideas like this was such an alien task coming straight from leaving cert where everything is just laid out for you. Over all I've had a great experience and I hope I've done enough to be able to continue that on, for my last piece of the project i created a 6ft tall, pink steel chair frame. I was able to find a space that allowed me to this and someone to guide me through the welding. it was a lot of fun to make and I'm quite disappointed I can't have it down for my assessment but bus eireann didn't seem to keen for me to strap it to the top of the bus down, but oh well. The concept behind this is just where i naturally progressed from my project, it's all about taking the everyday boring, mundane and banal and making you pay attention to them, taking them out of the light and context you usually see them in and forcing you to look at it and consider it properly and not just let it sink into the background.This topic has been explored by great artists such as Alice Maher and Claes Oldenberg

so after doing the inflatable sculpture workshop I decided to try to do it for myself. Inflatable sculptures allow you to create large sculptures quickly and cheaply which is ideal for someone in college. so here's a video of my sculpture, it takes a minute or two to inflate properly and the styrofoam didn't quite circulate around like I had hoped but i learned a lot from this and plan to use what I've learned on my next sculpture.

inflatable snow globe

so for the last week or so I've been working out ideas for an animation and drawing up a story board. After a talk with one of my tutors I came to realize that to properly put across my concept I'd have to move away from just flat 2d images.

so last week I did a wood cut print and was working through a couple of different ideas, with the wood cut i didn't get the exact effect I was looking for, after looking at a couple of my friends work I noticed that I'd be able to get the results I desired if I did a mono print. I aimed to get faded images also showing repetition. I wanted to do this as to show that the chair frame had a repeated use in our everyday lives but despite this always faded into the back ground and never really stands out.

so carrying on with the chair frame idea I did a wood cut and prints. I was aiming to get a messy and almost faded look to the images but from the wood print the lines were to bold and I didn't really get the effects I wanted so I plan on doing some mono prints, as from looking at the results my friends got I will be able to get the exact effect I desire.

The Wall Of Frame

so here it is my collection so far of my chair frame being re-marketed/interpreted.

keeping me on my feet

okay so I've been seriously neglecting my blog lately and that is no ones fault but my own. But i'm back in the swing of things so here's what I've been up to lately.

Yep that's right, my chair frame. After looking at artists like Alice Maher and William Eggleston and how they take everyday, ordinary and banal subjects, recreating them or reinterpreting them. I decided to direct my focus onto the frame of my chair. It's something that people rarely stop to admire even though it plays such a crucial part in our day to day lives. Like I get that with time people become accustomed to things like cars, dishwashers and other things so widely available. But most of these things interest some people, like come on there's thousands of stamp collectors out there, but I've never heard of a chair freak. From this I've decided the unsung hero that is the chair frame needs a little love, a little reinventing but more so a lot of re-marketing. The title of our brief is "to sense  my space" (as I hope you all know at this stage) and I've taken the approach of re-sensing/reinterpreting my space. So yeah that's where I'm at right now, I have some more pictures that I'll put up later. 

so these are the other photos from the wire tower.

Wire Tower no.2

I've been slightly slacking on my blog lately but that's not really here nor there, I built a larger version of the chicken wire and thread tower mixing in blue thread as well I got some interesting photos from it. I plan on taking some more this evening concentrating on the shadows. This is to show the affect of light on the negative spaces. Anyway here are some pictures of the inside of the structure.