Task For Feedback Week

During feedback week we have been given a weeklong task to visit the Holden gallery, the visual resource centre and Manchester museum. The task was to gather visual research to make a start on our mixed media unit.

I decided to capture photographs of every pattern, design, shape and texture that l found on the journey to and from the museum. For example, things like bricks, trees, doorways, buildings, pavements and peoples clothing etc. I have then gone on to develop these further by doing lots of sketches and studies incorporating some different techniques and media. I made some visual lists, graphs and maps with information I have gathered based on my journey. I have came up with some new innovative ideas to visually express my journey in interesting ways. I have never looked at maps and journeys in this way before so I found it experimental.

The visit to the museum was extensive; there was a huge variety of things exhibited. I found that l was drawn to all the rocks and crystals, as well as the shells, eggs and butterflies. I liked all the delicate detail of patterns and textures amongst these objects. The animals were something I chose to look at too because of all the patterns within their fur.

In our sketchbook, we were asked to work in black and white and keep it neutral with monochrome colours, so we were ready for our rotation into mixed media. This felt like l was limited a little as l love working in colour but l embraced it and actually really enjoyed working in this way.

Visiting the Holden gallery was also a good experience, there is some work based on patterns which l have noted that influenced me. There was also a piece of art called (dis)order - A compulsion to collect, which was made up of DIY and household equipment such as a lawnmower, sewing machine, radio, drill, power tool, hairdryer. This was all wired up to lots of different sockets and it shown how each of the objects worked at different times for a few seconds, it was all put together with some sort of clever sequence circuit. I thought this was an interesting way of collecting objects/data and displaying them in this group list form.

Finally after visiting the visual resource centre were thousands of slides are held and displayed, it made me realise that all these slides alone in the filing cabinets and wallets were actually data collections. They are kept in a clever organised list form. This was a useful way of storing them and they all had their own category and numbers, which made it easier when searching for a particular slide. Some were organised into lists for projecting lessons. Which id never really thought of being a list form before now. So l feel like my eyes are being opened to all sorts of different ways of working and gathering information.