Micron June

Here are a selection of my photographs for the 10th of June's Micron with Paul Woolford and Micron DJs...Fancy Dress!

2011 Final Degree Show

This will be me in a year's time. It is a scary thought, but also quite a satisfying thought to see how far I have come. The actual degree show itself was fantastic. I have never seen so many people in our University building before. It was great to mill around with people and discuss the artworks. So many different varying ones! But of course the work I took the most interest in was the Interactive Arts year. The range of work was so varied, and most of it was so different to stuff I would have even thought about. There seemed to be a lot of installations. It was good to have a look at what the 3rd year have been up to so that when it comes to our time I will know how to prepare for a professional end of year exhibition. At the end of the year, my tutor Will said that what I need to do to improve is stick to one idea and follow it through rather than try lots of different ideas here and there. My problem is maybe I have too many ideas and want to try them all? I need to learn to be more professional and focused for the future and know what I want, and then perhaps I will be more successful. Looking at the 3rd Year's final show has scared me into wanting to do the best I can, but also looking greatly forward to showing what I can do. All I need to do now is commit, commit commit 101%....

Creative Transit Exhibition at Cavendish bar!

So as a collective of artists, we finally got an exhibition at the Cavendish bar which turned out to be a great success. The vibe was very relaxed and it was a great chance for people to get together. As usual for an exhibition I wanted to create a new exciting piece of work; so carrying on from the idea of beastly mythological creatures, I decided to use the shapeshifter idea and just use animals to look like humans. I liked the idea of portraiture as it is quite a human thing to do; to get professional photographs done of ourselves or our families. I thought it would be funny to do a spin on this idea and use animals posing for photographs like humans instead. I decided the most realistic way of doing this at first would be to use Photoshop and crop them in that way. I love creating work with amusing effects so I was really pleased with the finishing result. The exhibition went really well and it was so good to see everyone's work on show and see what everyone is capable of.
Below is my first attempt at guessing what kind of animal would work for this project. It didn't work that well for me as the neck was awkward coming out of the body and it didn't look quite right. This was a good first experiment to seeing how it all went together as an image, even though I didn't use it in the final piece.

I decided the best animals to use would be aggressive animals as it was quite fitting linking in from my last project, 'Beastly.' I then ended up using these 3 final images for my exhibition and decided to keep the same title for my exhibition pieces:

Here is the final exhibition outcome:

Micron May

Hello everyone. You are now looking at the new Micron club photographer! The first gig was in May which was a collaboration with Future Everything! So no pressure or anything. I found it a little difficult at first as I've never done night time photography before, so the settings are completely different. Still, I think for my first effort, these pictures aren't too shabby :) This is only a few of the collection I took. I uploaded them myself on their facebook page, and they are even gonna add them to their website!! Wahay!

Kiki Smith

"Born" by Kiki Smith

Through the 'Visual Body' lectures I had, I came across an artist called Kiki Smith, who also works with animal/ humans together. The first image I saw of hers was a deer giving birth to a fully grown human which gives us the impression the deer has had sexual contact with a human. Birth is a natural thing, and the way we view her sculpture is probably the opposite. Her work with animals and humans however does seem quite sexual at first. Beastality, which is wrong anyway, makes it very strange to look at, as it's totally unnatural. However, I do like her work as she combines animals and humans to create new mythologies, which of course is what I've been looking at. This way of looking at it, mainly the deer represents rebirth. Creating something brand new. Let's try something new. Well why the hell not! Let's introduce animal/human hybrids into the world and fuck it up.. ha imagine that...

FutureEverything

I have just signed up to Volunteer for the FuturEverything and EuroCultured festival in Manchester which I'm quite excited about. I just need to hear from them now, so I will keep you up to date. I will be interested to see what they say, as on my application I just said that I really want to help with artists and musicians, as I think it will be a really rewarding experience in learning new skills, and putting my own to use.
The application form to sign up is here:
http://www.surveymonkey.net/FE2011-Volunteer

FuturEverything looks really exciting, I've seen posters around town, and I think it will be a great success, so I'm just hoping I get my chance too.
Here's the website:
http://futureeverything.org/

Telephoto lens

I found some ducks in my back garden back in Knutsford and I couldn't get a close enough shot, so I remembered my dad had a telephoto lens, and so I borrowed it for half en hour. The quality of the lens made the photos look so clear even when focused from far away. Just wish I could keep it for myself! I would love to further experiment taking close up shots of british wildlife, and make the most of the wildlife here and see what I can find. I want to improve my photographic skills so that for the future I may have a slight chance of being a photographer for a national geographic or any travel magazine... well everyone has to start somewhere....

Exploding Art

I found this amazing artist called  Alexandre Farto (aka Vhils) who worked with Portuguese hip-hop/soul band Orelha Negra on a piece of exploding street art off walls. It's a new thing no-one has ever tried before, and I absolutely love it, everything down to the filming to the music, it's just spot on. The use of slow motion in the video just dramaticises the artworks and just gives it so much more of a wow factor. I love the idea of strapping explosives to the plaster and exploding a part of the wall revealing something fabulously incredibly artistic- like a different form of street art. I'd never seen his work before, but I heard that when people saw the video, they went crazy for it, and I can see why. I love the aesthetics of these explosive artworks, as in some ways, no-one can predict how powerful certain explosions are, and so to create artworks that look well planned and beautiful, that's an achievement in itself. The video is here: 


                              
             Orelha Negra - M.I.R.I.A.M. X Vhils aka Alexandre Farto from Vhils on Vimeo.


I had a look on his website and I'm pretty impressed at the work on there too, it's mainly spray painted work. I was particularly impressed with the faces sprayed onto paper and the prints of the city and the 2 kids. They both look so detailed, and with the paint dripping off them, it gives them a really interesting effect.
There was a quote on his page which has kind of stuck with me: 


“Beauty is but skin deep, ugly lies the bone; Beauty dies and fades away, but ugly holds its own”


There is an interview with him on the Creators Project page. It's a really interesting interview and he talks about how he does certain things and why. He says that he likes uncertainty in his art, and for me this is very true to myself too. Spontaneity pushes me on, and makes art and life more interesting. And just like any other artist, he plans on making life more interesting via his artworks, getting rid of these concrete jungles that we live in, and instead out of it, he can create something amazing.
Here is the interview in full:  
http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/scratching-the-surface-of-vhils-explosive-graffiti-work-interview

An example of his exploding art in Moscow.

                                                                                

Beastly

Since Christmas I have been reading. An awful lot actually. And it's all to do with mythology. It has always interested me, and so I took it on to buy a 'Mythology Bible' and have been reading my mother's very very old children's book with loads of old greek mythology stories. Fascinating. This kinda stemmed from my last project last term called 'Masked.' I took this concept of monstrosities being created from me swapping features around and morphing animals with humans and decided to research where these ideas of monstrosities came from, and started to draw these ideas. There were so many different ideas from all different cultures, and originally I was going to focus on Greek mythology, but I decided to just do the ones I found most interesting. The Greeks monsters were particularly human/animal breeds, and I want to focus on the whole animal/human combination as soon as I can. First though, I did a few drawings with a description next to the creature and the beliefs about it.

Medusa of the Gorgons.

Shapeshifter

Mermaid

Chimera

Next I decided to bring some of these creatures to life and did a photo shoot of me as certain ones. I intended to do it in a non-realistic way as the creatures themselves aren't real...Or are they?
Here are a couple of examples:

VAMPIRE

MY OWN FAKE HUMAN/ANIMAL HYBRID

I have so many plans of what I want to do next. I have had these plans for a while, I just haven't done anything about it. Along this research, I got a book out of the library called 'Abberrations' by Jurgis Baltrusaitis ( translated by Richard Miller) In the book there is a section on the fable of the beast in man- Animal Physiognomy of which starts with a newspaper article of people being compared to animals- they all had a photograph of themselves next to the animals they look like. Some of them are uncanny- some of them not very similar, but amusing all the same. There were a few artists that have done drawings of men's faces and then putting in features of another animal- with amusing results. Le Brun is my favourite because the drawings really are uncanny. I would like to try this out for myself. But the main idea I came up with was based on this artist I found called Alex Castro who has done typical human style portraits except, instead of their normal head, an animal's head is in it's place. I plan on doing some similar portraits with my camera, and then hopefully go on to painting these in detail. I haven't painted in a while, so this is something I really want to do. Hopefully I can make the time to complete this, as I am very passionate about this project!!

Alex Castro

Charles Le Brun

Multiple Exposures Film Roll 1

I have recently discovered the many joys of multiple exposure photography with my new Diana camera. The first time was an accident as I didn't wind on my camera a couple of times when I was in Berlin, and then got overlapped images on one photograph and absolutely loved it, so I've been slightly addicted to it since. The most fun I have with it is that I never know what it's gonna look like. It's all a suprise. I just want to take more and more photos cause it is so much fun. I came across the artist Dietmar Busse who also uses double exposures in his photography. His style is a lot more refined and constructed better. However, as I'm still in the experimental stage and not much is planned, it's all a bit over the place; but not in a bad way. I have some ideas of how to approach my next roll of film; and that is to keep my camera positioned in exactly the same place so that only the subject is moving... could be like a kind of action sequence, or a ghost in your kitchen, or anything, I just kinda wanna go crazy.
So here they are: