Wood, Metals and Plastics 🛠
For our first week of this rotation, we headed into the workshop and started to play around with the idea of 'Line and Movement'.
I felt I could use the rod and tin both for creating straight and curvy lines. I found it harder to bend the rod and create these curvy lines, purely because it's stronger than a thin piece of tin. I did try a few attempts of using the polystyrene as more than a base but I just didn't like any/felt they weren't communicating anything interesting. My favourite piece has to be the final one with polystyrene or the circular one with tin and rod. This is strange to me as so far, I have been drawn to very geometric shapes and lines, all my work sort of linking to that aspect but here, I have found that with these, the more curly and circular pieces I enjoy visually a lot more. When taking photos, I loved the reflection the flash had on the tin, the shadows it created and the different tones of grey. I think that's another reason why the last one appeals to me so much. Overall I was surprised... again... by the fact I enjoyed the workshop as all my previous work has been very 2D, drawing, painting, etc so this was quite 'out of my comfort zone'.
To start ourselves off, we used mark-making again. I feel this is a good way to begin these 'spontaneous' sessions as you're not expecting a gorgeous drawing or an amazing outcome. You're taking it back to basics - the principles and elements - and exploring, seeing where it leads you.
I had a selection of tools in front of me and had the task or recording it's movement. Some people would take this quite literally and draw the specific object in it's stages of movement but I had a different approach. I wanted to use lines, and a few shapes, as this was another key word we had to look at, and take it in an abstract way.
After these drawings, we used them to help us create some 3D sculptures/pieces of work which conveyed these words - line and movement. We had 3 materials to choose from - tin, wire rod and polystyrene. I looked at my drawings and again, didn't take them literally. I looked at the shapes they created, where the lines went, etc, and then turned these into 3-dimensional work.
