Word and image

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Evaluation

With this project, I really struggled when it came to working non-figuratively. Within my usual work, I focus mostly on characters and their relationships to formulate a narrative, so this brief made me really think about how to use alternative methods to tell a compelling story. I found it fun to play around with shape theory, colour theory and symbolism within this project, as although I have used these narrative methods before within my works, making them the centre stage played difficult in execution.

In this project, I found a lot of enjoyment working with textiles. This is an area I have experience in, but not with abstract subjects, this made it fun to investigate the meanings and origins of certain fabrics to emphasise and symbolise certain aspects of my pieces, making the message more fleshed out and clear.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t complete my initial plans for this project, as I had wanted to create a sand animation and then a physical sewn tapestry, but I am still fairy happy with my outcome as I believe I affectively portrayed Kae Tempest’s lyrics and message in a thought provoking and visually interesting way. If I had delegated more time to this project, I would’ve hoped to have completed all 12 of the original sand animations. Within the time I had given myself, this was not possible as I hadn’t gotten the equipment prepared or the work hours to complete 12 full animations. This same sentiment goes for my second project idea, being a sewn tapestry, as designing each piece look way longer than expected, making it impossible to sew all in time.

I have reflected on the fact that I struggle to comprehend the practicality of my projects, often thinking way too large in scale for the project duration and my skill set. This has resulted in a lot of my projects being left unfinished or unrecognisable from the original project pitch. I also had issues with indecisiveness, as at multiple occasions I was torn between multiple possibilities for my project, most notably which text to choose as my subject matter. This stunted progression by a wide margin and made my enthusiasm for it dwindle.

I had really struggled within this project as well as Process and Practise, as researching and working on two separate projects at once really overwhelmed me. This has been an issue with my work within the past and although I have improved my time management skills and prioritising, it still proved difficult to manage twice the workload at once. Despite this, this has been a great learning opportunity to trial test methods which work for me to tell what study, and practical methods help me best when it comes to working on two separate projects.

Overall, although I really enjoyed working within this project, I believe I could’ve made a way better outcome in quality and execution if I had paced myself, delegated time, and started practical work sooner into the project instead of spending most of my time researching of brainstorming ideas. For the future, I will consider what priorities there are at the start of each project and equally balance practical work and planning. However from the experience I have had working abstractly, I will definitely try it again in the future.

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Final pieces (2/2)

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Final pieces (1/2)

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Medium change and WIPs

Due to the time it would take to create all 12 animations being too long to complete for the deadline, I decided to change the medium of my project to textile.

My initial choice to use sand for this project came from the intention to visualise the passing of time and the decline of the world. However with this change in medium, I will be using the fabrics to represent how the world is being held together with a thread and is tearing at the seams. I am also intending to intentionally choose each fabric for my piece to represent certain things depending on the fabrics origin, associations and name.

The choice to use textiles as a medium is also due to the association with flags. Within ‘Europe is Lost’ a lot of the narrative focuses around cultural identity and the actions of the UK, I believe making each piece resemble a flag will make this concept come across stronger.

My visual inspirations for this concept are both the Saint Georges Flag and Asafo Flags.

Within recent times, the Saint Georges flag has become a hate symbol, symbolising far right nationalism and anti-immigration policies. The Saint George’s flag has been appropriated by the far-right for a while, as the choice to choose a Saint Georges flag to represent national pride instead of a Union Jack inherently shows a desire for division, intentionally choosing to exclude the rest of the UK. In more recent memory, far-right extremist known as Tommy Robinson has campaigned to raise Saint Georges flags across the UK, claiming for it to encourage 'reclamation of the country back', a very blatant racist talking point meant to alienate immigrants and non-white Brits. Because of this association, I believe using imagery relating to the Saint Georges flag within this piece will help symbolise the themes of the rise in the far-right within the UK as seen in Kae Tempest's song.

As well as this, another heavy visual inspiration of mine has come from Asafo flags, these are flags originating from the Fante people of Ghana. The Flags originate from the union in trade between the Fante people and the British empire. The flags were made as to identify the military companies and were heavily inspired by British heraldry in design, often incorporating a union jack in the corner, whilst still maintaining a traditional folk art style. Throughout the years, Asafo flags were used to make political statements on the colonisation of Africa, being used to fight back against the loss of their cultural identity and freedom. I chose this as a source of inspiration as it not only displays an example of cultural exchange and British colonialism, but also is an example of textiles being used as a political statement.

(Misc examples of historical Asafo flags)

WIPs

For each piece of this project, I blocked out a different block of the text to draw inspiration from (Highlighted above)

Before completing My textile designs, I would block out colours and shapes in order to gauge what composition is best for the message and clarity of the subject.

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Animation tests

Storyboards

With these storyboards, I wanted to block out the keyframes of each animation, making use of bold shapes and strong visual language.

Digital animation tests

Before attempting the sand animation, I wanted to plan out how each of the animations would flow frame by frame digitally, just to visualise how they would move.

After creating one and a quarter of these animations, I realised that this task would be more challenging and time sensitive than expected, so I decided to go with a different medium for my outcome.

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Sand animation research

My main source of inspiration for sand animation was Caroline Leaf.

She was a pioneer for unconventional modes of animation, most famously sand animation, but she also worked with paint on glass and stretching directly into the film reel.

Films of hers I watched for inspiration

The Owl Who Married a Goose: An Eskimo Legend

In this short animation based on an Inuit legend, a goose captures the fancy of an owl, a weakness for which he will pay dearly. The sound e

Caroline's work is very surreal and abstract as it utilises the medium of sand to let frames and scenes dissolve into one another. I really want to utilise this stylisation within my own project as I believe it will help symbolise the passage of time and the deteriorisation of British society and government.

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Style development

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Figure making workshop

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Thumbnailing

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Further research

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Storyboard workshop

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Manifesto

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Compositional work

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Spray paint workshop

For this workshop, we were tasked on making a stencil spraypainted artwork abstractly depicting a historical rivalry.

For my own piece, I decided to portray the rivalry between monooses and snakes, this is a historic rivalry which branches over both folklore/legend and nature, both animals being practically equally paired in strength with the mongoose portrayed as the hero and the snake the villain.

Image used for reference for stencil shapes

Stencils

Stencil design sketches

Card stencils of mongoose [Left] and snake [Right]

For the stencils, I wanted to use very bold but recognisable shapes for each animal, the snake was easy to simplify as they are a simple shape, but I wanted to stylise it to frame the whole art piece, morphing it into a square shape with a tail crooked reacting to being bitten by the mongoose.

The mongoose was harder to simplify, for this I looked at many reference images of mongooses to make a shape which resembled them

Final piece

Final spraypainted piece

In the end, I am really happy with my outcome from this workshop, as it pushed myself to simplify figures into bold shapes whilst still maintaining a narrative. I will definitely work with stencil spray-painting in the future as well, as I found it really satisfying and I love the graininess in the texture.

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Poem workshop

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Research

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Group crit and workshop

As a group, we analysed each of our soundscapes and were tasked to make an illustration based on what you heard (my attempts pictured above).

Although my work wasn't personally critiqued by the class, from the rest of the class's work and others' critique, I found that my own summer project didn't fit the brief, as it wasn't non-figurative, clearly depicting a mouth and arms.

This group crit was overall very helpful as it allowed me to grasp what we were being truly being asked to make for the project.