Tag: Survival Kit

First Real Day at University

First Real Day at University

by turquoisecho ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The last few days have been a really stressful, REALLY exciting time for me. I moved into dorms on Saturday and have been settling in quickly… that means meeting all my flatmates, locating and visiting the nearest Wetherspoons and generally staying alive and healthy in lieu of my mammy doing everything for me back home.

I’m here to talk about the art, though! After icebreakers, everybody settled into small groups and looked through our survival kits.

The first task was to draw “instructional” diagrams of your (or another) survival kit, communicating each item’s use without using any written language. Think IKEA construction booklets.

Then we were tasked with mixing up our kits as a small group and creating a new survival kit, which in the process of naming image files on the laptop I dubbed “frankensurvival”.

The idea was really to push the limits of our creativity and we had free reign to do what we wanted, pretty much. Said, Zaina, Martha, Jemima and I made a small Bob Ross shrine and a small pile of potential weapons to beat enemies with, illustrated on the common public enemy of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Below are images from today.

This was our “Peace” shrine. See calming things… such as Bob Ross and “music” – charmingly represented by the only single I own, a cover of Under the Boardwalk by Bruce Willis bought for my 18th as a joke by mum.
This was our “war” area. Special mention to Polly PissPants and “So: You Want To Become a Cannibal”.
See our installation setup here – a visual recreation of the below installations. I was particularly proud of my sharpie Alvin and the Chipmunks art.
Some informational images depicting the intended use of our objects. Volume of War And Peace – for Smackdown (or a spot of light reading).
Headphones and Mood Meter glasses to detect nearby infants close to tantrum.
Special cameo made by me on the right – 3 worshiping Bob Ross.

Overall, it was a fun day. Our final survival kit was easily one of the most comically inclined of all of those students made. Well over half of them were quite depressing, really. VERY heavy on the climate change and anti-political, environmentalist-dystopian views. I have to say there was one kit that made a point on having a positive, conscientious outlook on the future and was generally a very pretty kit; I hold respect for the group that created that amongst such an existential crowd.

Wow. Yikes.

Wow. Yikes.

by turquoisecho ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

So I’m heading up to Cardiff tomorrow as an intermediary point between here and Crete (joining my dad and his girlfriend Rachael before we all embark to the airport together the following day). I’m mentioning this because it means that I won’t get a chance to do art for over a week bar the small en-plain-air paintings I managed in France. I certainly won’t be able to get any more work done on the survival kit project.

This prompted a frantic stint on my sketchbook tonight, resulting in a page I’m really proud of.

Wow . Yikes .

The graphic design-esque nature of the two words was created pretty much on a whim, with a very vague yet different final product in mind. The feeling of confusion and sickliness comes through exactly as I’d hoped it to, though, and I count this as a massive success.

The lino cut prints were ones I created during my A Levels… but since my survival kit is themed heavily around anxiety about surviving independent life and how one is perceived to be surviving, I thought the eyes surrounding and blocking the faceless figure was only appropriate. I have a cut I’ve done in my leisure of a converse shoe I plan to use in later experiments.

One of my anxieties is whether I will make another actual lino cut I’m equally proud of soon. I’d like to try and make another complex piece like this one, perhaps similar with unsettling themes and eyes.

In other news, my blank white backpack arrived in the post! This is my container for the survival kit. I don’t have the time or resources to make a bag I’ll be happy with from scratch so I bought a blank white backpack to paint and embroider to my wee heart’s content!

It’s huge. I have a few ideas, though.

Hello World!

Hello World!

by turquoisecho ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I’ve been asked by my University, Oxford Brookes, to start a blog detailing my artistic journey. That includes what I create, the thought processes behind it and retrospectives on how it could be improved.

A recent embroidery – a nice, neutral, pleasing photograph to start a blog post with. In my opinion.

So I started a blog on Tumblr! It was a site I knew from a few years ago, and the tagging system made sense to me. It was about a month later I recieved an email that detailed that the blog specifically had to be on WordPress. In a similar way, they asked me to start a sketchbook, which I did – before (in the very same midsummer email) requiring it to be A4, which was considerably bigger than the size I’d chosen for myself.

So here we are, progress wiped and starting anew – new blog, new sketchbook, new me. In a note of optimism, I have been searching for a long time for a decent blogging platform and for some reason I dismissed WordPress, but after making the effort it looks like the perfect site!

And in regards to my sketchbook, I was a little distressed upon hearing that I couldn’t hand it in to fit the brief. And by distressed, I mean a month of serious work became irrelevant. After a very short and very mature cry, I tackled that problem by taking high quality photographs of all the relevant “survival kit” pages and scaling them up, before sticking them chronologically into my new A4 sketchbook.

See? Looks good!

The upside of that was that my small sketchbook had very quickly become a personal sketchbook – that is, doodles, irrelevant paintings and studies, etc. This is great (and what I am told constitutes a good sketchbook) – however, when I read the Survival Kit brief, it seemed like the sketchbook was supposed to be a lot more on-topic than I had made my own. So this is a chance to set that right, too!

I’ll see if this blog doesn’t take a similar turn. I guarantee it’ll become a diary. Because when I make art it’s inextricably linked to my life and what’s going on, so it only makes sense that I talk about the inspiration and cause of what I make. Want an example? I stitched lavender into the embroidery because I’ve spent all the summer season working at a tea shop on a lavender farm, and manning a gate to a beautiful lavender field. So there we go!

Let’s see if I can’t satisfy my need for order by figuring out how to categorise blog posts.