Personal Module Evaluation
In the beginning of the project I struggled with the brief and generating ideas, but after visiting the area a few times and discussing the project with the members of my group and hearing the routes they had decided to go down I was able to generate my own individual ideas that were specific to my style and other styles I was interested in, which is when I had the idea to create colour-cut boxes.
I was both producing work for myself and the tutors and leaders of my course that would evaluate the work in the end, I did this by using the ideas that I liked and thought would interesting pieces of work but also by using the feedback from the individual assessments with the tutors about certain aspects I could explore and ideas they offered me that they liked.
Out of the two words we were given I found it would be more conclusive to focus on the one as given the area we got it would have been difficult and ultimately unproductive to use the other, but the theory surrounding identity and its relevance to the people and places in my area underpinned my whole project. But I also looked into many artists who informed my work and helped me develop my own ideas, the artists who inspired the colour-cut boxes were Hari and Deepti and David Thorpe because he used a very interesting composition of shape and colour to create images of different landscapes.
The best ideas I came up with were the decisions to make a number of colour cut boxes rather than just one because it helped expand the range of work I could display and show at the end of the project, and they're also original and unique to myself because of the way I chose to design them. In relation to the collaborative aspect of the project and the development of the zine the best idea I had was to focus on the identities of the custard factory worker and their shops because I could then introduce some portraiture into my work and my project was no longer just building based. It also forced me to talk and interact with the shop keepers which is hard for me to do, by doing so I was forced out of my comfort zone and even if they said no to having their picture taken the reaction wasn't negative, it was just a personal preference.
Before starting the project and at regular intervals throughout I made sure to create plans and record any ideas that I had, and after they were written down I would do a short study on them and do a short practice of the idea. This is why my final product was different from the ideas I initially had, because in the beginning I had wanted to do some lino prints for the final design but after attending a workshop I found that I had difficulty with the techniques involved and shorty after I discovered light boxes which drew me in a different direction, but before fully deciding to take this route I created two prototypes that I believe were successful attempts.
Asides from Hari and Deepti and David Thorpe I also looked into a number of other practitioners, the main one being Kara Walker who inspired the addition of a character into the colour cut-out designs and Matisse paper cuts and Craig Atkinson who helped inspire and influence the work I did using the left over pieces of paper from the boxes to make two experimental pieces that afterwards I used as part of the design for the front and back pages of the zine.
I produced the ending solution by first going out and taking images of the area of I was given, and because of where our dart landed we got an interesting area with many unique styles of older looking buildings which were much different than the areas that come to mind when you picture Birmingham because typically you'd image the centre or the bullring. Afterwards I discussed in one of the sessions leaving my area to take pictures as a sort of extended research I could use to contrast against the pictures I took in my area because I came up with the idea to juxtapose the vibrant, art and culture of Digbeth and the calculated, symmetrical high-rise buildings of the city centre and surrounding area. I then thought of how to use these in both my individual work and collaborative work and came up with the idea for colour-boxes and a zine composed of images i'd taken.
Actually producing the design for the colour cut boxes involved buying a lot of card in lots of different colours and gradients and then figuring out a scale for the designs that I could stick to and then cutting them out in these dimensions and started drawing the designs over them in pencil, making sure to separate the shapes by colour so that when it came to spacing the sheets apart with foam core board and sticking them together, the designs would make sense and look visually appealing. For the zine it was just a case of opening up photoshop, choosing the dimensions of the pages and then to start arranging the pages in relation to the conceptual designs from earlier, although the final product is much longer and a lot of the pages have changed. And after i'd arranged the images and simple text I printed it off and began the process of using cut pieces of paper to layer over the images and spray painting titles and cutting and sticking them down.
I am especially proud of the 4 colour-cut boxes that I created as the final product of the project because it was an approach that i'd never considered or explored before and it could have turned out terrible had I not been carful because if the sheets weren't cut to size properly the designs would fit on the boxes or would appear skewed but in the end I consider it a successful effort. As I mentioned earlier the ideas I had about creating lino prints failed and didn't managed to produce the results I wanted so I had to generate new ideas. I will change my approach in the future by starting the project off stronger than I did this time around, as I found in the beginning I didn't have any good ideas and this meant that I wasted time not doing anything productive, leaving me with less time for other work.
