Project | Textiles Deadline.

One of my toiles for my jacket

Last Wednesday came our Textiles project deadline!
We have been working on this project for the entire year, and it sure feels like it.
While working on a project for an entire year means a LOT of work (I had to drag my Mum along with me to uni to help me carry all my stuff), it also means a bit too much thinking plus a side dish of procrastination.

I hope to do a little photo shoot and get some better pictures of my final piece, but as for now, here are a few pictures taken during the process of creating my jacket.

As soon as I go and collect my stuff I also plan to do a conclusion to my Project series of posts, if you haven't seen them already, click here :)

Project | The Berwick St vs. Holloway Road Price Implosion!

 Today I also finally managed to purchase my materials for my textiles final piece.
I initially had plans to create an entire outfit for out catwalk show, but since plans for the event have fallen through, and unfortunately now we wont be having a catwalk to present our final collections I have settled with creating just the jacket.
Besides, this will allow me to spend longer putting it together and will mean that I am under a considerable amount of less pressure. 

Its quite a bummer and I am pretty gutted that it won't be taking place, but us second years are adamant that plans will go ahead for next year!

As I showed you all in my last Project post, I took a visit to Berwick Street to source some materials.
Berwick street is a much more pleasurable place to pick and compare materials, as the shops are quite big and they have a wide range to choose from.
But, there extortionate prices are slightly ridiculous!

So, today I went to good old Rolls and Rems and The Nags Head Market on Seven Sisters Road, near Holloway Road Underground, looking for some similar materials and ended up buying the materials above; some of which are the exact same material on offer at Berwick Street.

To conclude, I ended up spending under £25 on materials and some other bits and bobs (the pastel pink and green materials I bought simply because I liked them..... and they were £1 per meter) which would have cost me in the region of £80 on Berwick Street!

Project | Material shopping in SoHo

Hi all, just a quick update. :) I have been so busy lately with uni work, I haven't had a chance to do a blog post!

So, here is a little post just to let you all know what I'm up to! Today I visited the Grand Designs Live Exhibition at ExCel which was pretty good, I got free tickets from my university, so there was no excuse not to visit!

I also went material shopping in SoHo, I am still working on my textiles piece, so needed to go and pick out some possible materials.

The shops that I visited are;
 The Cloth House, 47 & 98 Berwick Street, W1F 8SJ
 Borovick, 16 Berwick Street, W1F 0HP 
The Berwick Street Cloth Shop, 14 Berwick Street, London, W1F 0PP
 
I am looking to create my collection using fabric that looks quite raw and textural, alongside metallic, bright harsh colours and laminated areas, to try and reflect the colours and textures in my imagery of the city.

I also want to try and mix in some suede and Corduroy, but getting that many sample of that size was hard work enough.......

you can have a look at my collection of Project posts here.

Project | Pattern cutting for the novice, I mean textiler.

 

Hi all! So this whole weekend I have pretty much dedicated to actually doing some hand in worthy Textiles work! *Insert Applause Here*

I also found out this morning that we have a formative assessment tomorrow, so I am quite happy that I have been a good student and put a load of time in!

If you have liked my page on Facebook then you hopefully would have seen my post saying that I received my pattern cutting book (which I ordered from here).
When I bought it I was pretty skeptical, as I thought that because I have never done any form of pattern cutting before I would be way to out of my depth.

But trying to be optimistic I bought it anyway.
Remembering the advice someone who was doing a pattern cutting course gave me when I expressed my interest in pattern cutting, that 'you can only learn it, by doing it' that a lesson won't teach you anything unless your willing to put time in yourself and that I should by a book and have a go! 

And so after the massive fail of my last attempt at making a body piece for my project, I have nothing to loose. (You can read a bit more about that here)

So far I have managed to make a basic bodice and sleeve block, and edit them to how I want my garment to look, after using a LOT of pattern paper and then moving onto newspaper and five pretty successful toiles.
I also obviously needed some material to create my toiles with and went to the fabric shop to find out just how expensive (in budget student terms) calico actually is and then buy 10 meters of some brownish, not so stretchy polyester, cotton mix (who actually knows?) ugly stuff fabric for £1 per meter. Yay!

The book I bought by Dennic Chunman Lo, has been really useful (it must be good if I have actually managed to create something that actually works) and the step-by-step instructions are super easy to follow and the images and illustrations along the way are so clear and useful!

Project | Textures of the City.

Firstly I would just like to point out that this post is a continuation of my post, Project | Question Everything. Since that last post I have been working on making project more focused. As I mentioned in that post I was looking at street culture and its meaning. I wanted to somehow use our project 'Future Fashion' in order to portray an idea that as fashion evolves, people will want (as I explained with the Punk Revolution) clothing that is self-expressive and reacts to its environment.

We have had our exhibition showing our 'body pieces' that we developed from triangular pieces, which you can see here, Δ . I was/am so disastrously unhappy with mine (hence why I haven't shown you all!), I am prepared to hide it away forever (burn it after the year is over / chuck it under a train / send it into space / drown it in a river) and I want to create a much better constructed and executed piece piece in the next two weeks while we are on holidays!
(Most definitely NOT using plastic. Plastic is a Bitch.)

In the pictures above you can see the four mood-boards (you can click them to make them bigger) we were asked to create in order to easily show the aesthetic influences of our ideas. I was having massive difficulty focusing my ideas and these boards have slightly helped me in trying to focus on some clear aesthetic points. But I am still massively underwhelmed with my creative output, lets just say...... I have a lot of work to do! 

Isa Genzken | Hauser & Wirth | Peace & Plastic Figures

 Hi all! If you have liked me on Facebook you will be aware of mine and Eerika's (http://eerikasblog.blogspot.co.uk/) adventure today, we had to meet this morning at 10:15 for a talk at the WGSN Headquarters near Piccadilly Circus. The talk was incredibly interesting and we were shown through the working of the WGSN website and how we as students cant make the most out of the information that is available to us. To be honest, due simply to its availability to us, (thanks to our amaze-balls uni) I had underestimated the importance of WGSN and to be honest didn't expect some of the brands that were mentioned would want anything to do with something that could alter their creative direction. 

But hey, that's why I am here. Learning!

So, returning to the main purpose of this post. We had a walk and took visits to several galleries (the rest will be covered in different posts, today or not depends on how hormonal my computer is feeling.) including Hauser & Wirth; which is always home to some incredibly interesting exhibitions, and is located on the super fantastic Savile Row. The exhibition was showcasing the works of Isa Genzken, I had no idea what was being exhibited and was very happy to find something (from an artist I admittedly had never heard of before) that was incredibly relevant to the idea's that I am trying to develop within my current project. I understand that I keep mentioning this 'project' and the only inkling I have given you about it is a post about triangles,,, ( http://aestheticsousveillance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/triangles-are-my-favourite-shape.html  ) back in october... But I will have another post soon.

My head has been slightly overwhelmed and confused by it all, and that would have made for nothing more than a blog post that would have had me sent straight to a mental asylum.

Anyway,,,,,, here's some stuff about the exhibition from the Hauser & Worth Gallery Webpage. 

Yes, I like to leave the hard bits to somebody else. I'm a textile artist not an art critic. 

If you have the chance I would definately go and check this one out,,, I have released that I think I have said that in every single exhibition post I have done so far. I am sure after a while a bad one will come. And I can have a good rant and tell you all to stay away! :-) But for this one, don't.

"Isa Genzken

15 November 2012 – 12 January 2013,

‘I have always said that with any sculpture you have to be able to say, although this is not a ready-made, it could be one. That’s what a sculpture has to look like. It must have a certain relation to reality’
– Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans 

Inspired by the stark severity of modernist architecture and the chaotic energy of the city, just as much as by art history, the aesthetics of the great American artists of the Sixties and pop culture, Isa Genzken’s work is continuously looking around itself, translating into three-dimensional form the way that art, architecture, design and media affects the experience of urban life. From 15 November, Genzken will present an exhibition of new and recent works at Hauser & Wirth’s Savile Row gallery. Genzken’s totemic columns, pedestal works and collages combine disparate aspects from her many sources in seemingly nonsensical, yet harmonious sculptural compilations.

The bust of Nefertiti, an ancient icon of feminine beauty, is one of the most well-known and historically significant sculptures. In Genzken’s new series of sculptures, she appropriates plaster reproductions of this bust, which the artist first saw at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, gives them sunglasses and places them upon tall, white pedestals. She pairs Nefertiti with a reproduction of the Renaissance icon of feminine beauty, the Mona Lisa, whose famous portrait leans against the foot of each pedestal. Genzken then overlays her own self-portrait on to the reproduction of Mona Lisa, playfully inserting herself and her own practice into this multimedia exploration of the lineage of feminine beauty and the place of women in art history.

Genzken’s sculptures are precariously stacked assemblages of potted plants, designer furniture, empty shipping crates and photographs, among other things, arranged with the traditions of modernist sculpture in mind – traditions which are then manipulated by the artist. With this cacophonous array of objects, Genzken undermines the classical notions of sculpture and, in the North Gallery of Savile Row, re-creates the architectural dimensions of the artist’s beloved skyscrapers and the riotous colours of the city streets. Devoid of the weightiness and overpowering scale seen in the sculptures of her Minimalist predecessors, these works abandon notions of order and power, allowing the viewer to relate to the works’ inherently human qualities of fragility and vulnerability.

Both sculpture and photography combine and overlap in Genzken’s collages, whose dense surfaces are formed from the materials of the artist’s world: magazines, flyers, snapshots of friends, self-portraits and reproduced artworks. Genzken makes use of all surfaces of the gallery, including an on-going series of collages that span the floor of the space, like a pavement down a busy city street."

Text taken from  http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/1432/isa-genzken/view/

and to finish,,, if you want to show some support and appreciation for my blog head over to www.facebook.com/aestheticsousveillance , hit like and share! 

And if there's any thing you need to get off your chest mail me. 

Peace and Plastic Figures.

Print

Print hand painted and skirt designed and created - Ruby Cowan

 Necklace and Printed Cape - Ruby Cowan

Having to decide my pathway by the end of the month I decided to look through some of my foundation work I did at Central Saint Martins to finalise whether print was right for me. I always thought I would do multi media when applying for a degree at Loughborough textiles design and innovation, however when I come to look at my work it is more print based than anything!

Here are two very different pieces I have done, one is hand painted and the other is digital design.

The second print is inspired by fossils and  had printed onto fabric! The other I used iron transfer onto satin material.

Enjoy

X

p.s Happy Birthday Karen :) xxx

Engagement.

Some photographs of some stencils for some prints I am working on, I have been looking at facial expressions as a way of provoking engagement and reaction from the viewer. As peoples facial expressions change the way that you react towards them. 

I created them as part of a self promotional CD project, and plan to overlay them on a collage of some photos taken in 1993, which I went out and recaptured in 2012!