city brief #5 lantern making

cotton and cups

Using cotton with my existing moulds. Casting with cotton, casting with coloured cotton, using cotton as a drawing tool, using negative space in the vessel to thread cotton...

city brief #4

Top, my own sketch of possibilities using space beneath the mancunian way. Bottom, Right,Eduard Sautai ‘home sweet home’ exhibition at the university museum, Chiang Mai, Bottom Left Photo taken in the Designlab, MMU, Oct 2010.

Home sweet home addresses the issues facing a newcomer, a traveller someone new to a place or a city. He references nomadic shelters, and the need to settle, and to build your own space to feel at home. This work is visually similar to the construction in the designlab, as well as this idea of suspending lanterns. I also think that it addresses some issues in the Hulme area such as the displacement of people in the 80’s when many residents were forced to move into overspill estates in Wythenshawe. Essentially pulling apart a community. I would like an event that brings the community together.

Craft Shop, Royal Exchange Products-drawing

Using waste cotton as a drawing tool has produced some beautiful patterns to work with.

Craft Shop, Royal Exchange initial product ideas

The royal exchange brief is pretty wide and varied, I wont go into detail, but the there is an upcycling theme and a wish to encourage a younger audience to shop there. As a group we have decided that it would be great to bring the upcycled nature of the royal exchange itself, previously functioning as a cotton exchange together with the products. The Designlab physically sits among fashion, textiles and embroidery workshops and we are lucky enough to have access to their leftover thread

'bitbox' from their looms. I am using this cotton, at the moment to create pattern and decoration within my existing range of tableware. I'm very exited to be able to try something new with my work and to hopefully move it forward and to develop it further.

Photos

Top, cast cup rolled onto cotton and black slip

Centre, cotton in slip body

Bottom, Cotton dipped in blue slip, to be pressed onto the clay surface.

city brief #3 light and the city...

Interventions and the city, celebrating spaces with light...

national-glasgow radience festival celebrating the city with light.

international-Lyon festival of light

local-http://breadartcollective.co.uk/ bringing together community, spaces and light using handamde paper lanterns and 'flashmob' style events in chorlton, Manchester.

city brief #2 manchesterisnotnewyork

Thoughts on the city. My work for the last 12 months has circulated the idea of the city. Living in a city, my personal relationship with the city.

"The city is elusive. Especially from our point of view, that of those who are inside it. The tools you need to look at it clearly have to be seen from the outside, you have to keep your distance. Maybe you could try and look down on the metropolitan space from above and imagine taking possession of it. But that would only be a visual conquest." Metropolitiscape, the urban landscape in contemporary art, 2007.

Conquest, Elusive, Distance. With ceramics I have taken this notion of stepping back and looking at the city, peering and noticing what may be overlooked by using colour, illustration and form.

“I would prefer to say ‘street landscape’ or ‘cityscape’, for what it refers to is the actual landscape total image, which is produced by the arrangement and forming of masses in some manner as the natural landscape emerges out of the grouping of mountain masses and vegetation.” Stadtderwelt 1899, as cited in Frisby, 2001 Cityscapes of Modernity.

Stadterwelt here speaks about the city and its urban landscape. the accumulation of buildings over many years produces a unique cityscape

After our conversations with the manchester modernist society and learning about their passions I have looked into how others celebrate the city, the spaces that they live in and the people they live with.

http://mcrnotny.tumblr.com/ a visual study of fire escapes in manchester

'fire escape n. a structure or device, such as an outside stairway attached to a building, erected for emergency exit in the event of fire.' mcrntny.tumblr.com

http://lookupmanchester.blogspot.com/

'Look Up is a collaborative effort between students at the Manchester School of Architecture that hopes to raise awareness of architecture and the built environment of the 'original modern' city - Manchester.'

www.manchesterdailyphoto.com

A blog that does just what it says on the tin. I love looking at how others perceive the city visually, what catches their eye in comparison to my own in the same city.