A few gigs...

Ive been to a couple of gigs the last few weeks, much better than going to a club with rubbish music!!

I went to see Imogen Heap, who i saw at Glastonbury this year, but seeing her at the o2 Academy in Liverpool was just fantastic. She truly is amazing, and her music can be so inspiring... she creates some really awesome sounds!

Another band i went to see was Young Blood Brass Band at Band on the Wall in Manchester. A fantastic hip-hop brass band, great to have a boogie to!

Mary Greg

So a belated update on the Mary Greg Project. After visiting Platt Hall, looking through the collection and around the spaces Platt Hall offers i was able to start planning what i can create for an exhibition there in 2012.
Some things found while rooting through the collection...

Original note cards documenting the items in the collection...

One of the spaces that i could perhaps use, under the stairs... also could use the alcoves of the stair case or the window in the middle of the stairs...

There were loads of interesting things see in the collection and to use as inspiration to create something to display, many spaces to use, all totally different, and will need to consider who will be viewing the exhibition...

Liverpool Biennial

Spending a day wondering around Liverpool, somewhere i thought i knew quite a lot about now, made me aware there was a lot i had yet to discover! Following the Biennial map around town i started at the Walker Art Gallery viewing the John Moores Painting Prize. There were some interesting paintings exhibited, one of which was by George Sherlock 'Polycrylic Decades' 2009. This was acrylic paint onto polythene, creating a very textured, abstract painting.
I then headed to the Visitors Centre where i was first confronted with some VERY bizzar videos!

From here i went to FACT to see the documentation on the one year performance piece by Teching Hsich. From the 11 April 1980 to the 11t April 1981 the artist took a photograph of him self every hour every single day of the year, only missing out a few photographs.

Wondering around town, trying to find this suspended building...

Being let into the small chapel next to the Anglican Cathedral enabled me to get a decent picture of Tracey Emins 'The Roman Standard' before heading inside to see 'The Temple of a Thousand Bells' by Laura Belem. This piece was very calming and tranquil, with dull lighting, mostly from the natural light which i assume would changed due to the weather, creating different effects. Also there was sound with this piece, sounds of the glass bells and readings in a male voice.

The last place i visited was A Foundation to see the performance piece by Sachiko Abe, 'Cut Paper'. This was by far my favorite piece of the day, mainly because i am very interested in the delicateness of paper, and here she has cut countless sheets of paper so fine they have taken on a totally different form to the original piece of paper. from where she was sat above the ground, she was create in a continuous waterfall of paper, the displaying it across the large space, rising up to a point in the middle of the room.
There were other works by Abe, clouds of cut paper in a tiny box room, fall above your head of you walk in, an drawings by the artist also.

Birds

So i can pretty much say at some point i will relate my art work to birds in some way...

This has pretty much been the first opportunity Ive had to update this blog in the last week or so a i have been very busy making bird bags for ringers across the world.

(http://emberizadae.blogspot.com/)

Ringing is something that will probably also come into my work so i have included a link to a blog that it worth having a look at if you are wondering what ringing actually is...

http://ascouseringer.blogspot.com/

This is a bog my other half posts on about his/our ringing adventures. We go out pretty much every weekend (lovely 5.30am starts!) to catch us some birds, hence why this has been quite an influence on some of my work, and will continue to be.

Thought this was also worth a mention, a bit of background knowledge as to where some of my inspiration comes from...

Great Grey Shrike (Portugal 2010)

Despicable me!

Everyone has to go see Despicable Me! I know its a child's film, but its one of those that really anyone can watch! It the most hilarious film i have seen in ages and Ive been recommending it to everyone i see. I guarantee you will laugh all the way through, the characters are fantastic and so so funny.
Just thought it was worth a mention...

Eraserhead

Another group project for the 3rd week was to create a sweded version of a movie we were given. My group was given 'Eraserhead', a film i had not heard of, but was probably the best one we could have been given. We couldn't get the film out from the library because it was already on load so we squashed round a computer to watch YouTube clips of the film, but without sound as there were no speakers, which kind of made the clips even more creepy! We then decided on which parts of the film we were going to recreate, and split up responsibilities of getting props etc.

I was in charge of getting a moving chicken an mutant baby... and not forgetting the jelly worms!

I had to go back to Liverpool on the Monday evening, and so on Tuesday morning, while waiting for the bus back to Manchester i thought i would me good use of my time by making a start on the mutant baby. While getting quite a few odd looks from fellow passengers, i managed to create my mutant baby and chicken look-a-like from a few sheets of scrunched up newspaper and tights, putting on the finishing touches when getting into uni ready for filming.

Chicken(ish thing)

Mutant (porridge) baby

So after just managing to film all the scenes before the battery ran out at the end of the day, we moved onto the editing suit on the Thursday. We had a play around with the software and managed to produce our sweded film.
For the sound we decided not to use any speech, and we were no going to have any sound until we were messing around with the sound from he title scene with the rubber. We slowed the sound down and realised i fitted in really well with the film and so repeated it once through the film and just used that. Due to the slowed sounds in the clip it ended up sounding quite freaky and so it was perfect!

This was the end result, that we were all rather pleased with...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQl3xltFn6Y

Party! Party! Project

So the first group project was to be grouped up with some of the 2nd year Interactive Art students to have a party! We were given a theme, our group being a party with dysfunctional guests. An interesting theme, something we had to have a little think about. We decided we would have a bit of a story line, being a totally dysfunctional family throwing a Christmas party...that inevitably goes completely wrong.
We assigned different tasks to everyone, to collect decorations and dysfunctional (broken) furniture to fill our space with.
We managed to gather quite a few odd bits to create our party, with a very lovely member of the group bringing in homemade party cakes and biscuits.
We decorated our party space...

and it turned out to be rather dysfunctional! (and just abit of a mess)

It was fun to create but we couldnt really fit in our space! Anyway, after everyone had decorated their spaces,we had a few introductory words about each one and then let the parties commence.

It was agood way to get to know the 2nd years, and the rest of the 1st years for that matter. I felt, in my group, everyone had an input towards the ideas and eveyone was heard.

Summer Game Project

When i received the brief for the summer project i was quite stuck for ideas for what i wanted to do. I knew i wanted to include an interest of mine, which is birds and bird ringing, but was having difficulties trying to decide how i could go about this. After much thought, and ideas of an active game, a memory game etc, i decided to create a board game. I knew because of the subject i had chosen the game had to be educational as i was not expecting people to know or understand what bird ringing actually was. I figured choosing a board game to might be the best way of getting this across. So one Saturday, when we were sitting in the woods catching some birds, i started jotting down some ideas for my game. With some input from my other half i came up with a plan to create an educational board game about bird ringing. I wanted to include aspects of ringing such as how its actually done, setting nets, ringing and taking measurements etc. Also including some good and bad points of it, catching foreign controls and new species as pros and getting pooed on and pecked with VERY sharp beaks as cons. Long story short, i created my board game with all these things and was very pleased with the end result. I was also pleased that i was able to use all my own photographs to include in the game, a way of showing that this is where I've been and what i have done.

So when it came to playing the game on our first day, i thought it might take a little while to get through, because i hadn't had time for a test run so i wasn't too sure. Anyway, it didn't take long to get through, but from the feedback i got it was an inventive game and was enjoyed by the players. I hope it was a little educational for the people involved, but if not it was still something a bit different, and i enjoyed explaining a little about what each square meant and what bird ringing is to my group.