David Shrigley at The Hayward Gallery London.

Before I even got to the exhibition, I was extremely excited in my geeky little self in the idea of seeing a David Shrigley exhibition. I had seen his work before and loved the awkward cartoons he projects. I suppose one could say you either love or hate him, but being interested in anything a little bizarre; his work is my kind of cup of tea. 

His works were titled under the themes of, 'Death,' 'Misery,' 'Characters,' and 'Misshapen things,' and not in that particular order. In fact they weren't even shown around the gallery space as those groups either. Each piece of work was unique which ended up getting you to beg for more when you had finished walking through the artist's mind of wonderment. I found that I laughed through the exhibition, and to hear other people's laughs was quite refreshing in a gallery space because normally people are so serious in these type of spaces, which in some ways puts me off! What I liked most is his unusual perception of the world through dark humour shown through illustrations, animations, taxidermy models, sculptures, and photographs. My favourites were the animations and cartoons he drew. I think if you can remind people how things are pretty crappy in the world but show it in a way that it makes people laugh, then you've got it spot on. We are learning to accept the bad, but not necessarily support it. The taxidermy models were really interesting to look at, as they were very sinister but had this great sense of mystery around them. Everything has a story in my opinion and we wonder why they became a stuffed animal. 

I think his work connects into mine quite a bit with the way he uses his odd views of the world and creates art out of it. He, just like me, aims for the same audience reaction, " The response I would like are laughter, intrigued confusion and disquiet." When Creative Transit started up last year I described my work to provoke reaction in the same way. We also similarly use a lot of illustrations in our work as well as animation. This is the first time I have seen a great likeness of my work to another artist's work without having done any prior research. Great minds think alike? Always questioning and never accepting.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Before I went to London, I initially planned to go there because I was going to this travel photography seminar on the Saturday morning. Absolutely gutted isn't the word when I found out they cancelled last minute!! Anyway, good can always come from bad and so I planned a last minute list of places I wanted to visit. In usual fashion I didn't exactly stick to the plan! I managed to fit in a lot on that day but one exhibition that stood out was this outside display of photographs on stands outside the National History Museum. I'm glad I stumbled across this as missing out the seminar made it worthwhile for a little bit. There were many many wonderful photographs taken from all over the world to showcase the best in wildlife photography. They ranged from arty photos to detailed photos to once in a lifetime shots. I was really impressed with the diverse array, but however in moments like this I always think to myself, "I could do that." Who knows though. Maybe one day I will...

Tea Room

Here are some of the photos from the pop up tea room circa January-February 2012  that we as an Interactive course put together in a 1930s theme to serve tea, cake and sandwiches to the public. We did this in order to raise money for our degree show. People from many of the other art courses donated some of their work for the 'Salon Hang exhibition' which would take place in the tea room area. I donated 3 cakes that I made by scratch and did a fair bit of pot washing and carrying stuff back and forth. People from our course dressed up in 1930s style outfits doing table service while the little canaries in the centre of the room cheeped away. We aimed to make £2,000, but instead ended up making a whopping £6,000. Incredible. 

Lights & Music animation

I made an animation with the long exposure lights I did in the woods in Knutsford. I wanted to see what they would look like flowing all together in a short film; 12 seconds in fact. I only did a bit of editing; the main issue was deciding which order to put the photographs and how fast. Here is the result: