Exhibition Space

Our exhibition space is currently being built. It is down a little cobbled road in Banbury Town Centre called Church Lane. It’s a really big, light open space which is perfect for our gallery of art. My space is the first space on the right as you walk in and is opposite the butchers which is quite apt considering I will have cow tongues on meat hooks hanging out of the wall. So far I have taped and given my walls one coat of paint so it still has a way to go. I have also helped tape and paint the rest of the exhibition space and will help with the final clean up before the Private view evening too.

My Exhibition Preperation

The work that I am displaying this year is a collection of various ceramic tongues. My project has been about the value of materials which lead to how society values certain materials i.e why we would choose to eat with a pure silver spoon than a dirty wooden one and what classes these materials belong to to dirt and contamination. The tongues I have made symbolise disgust and contamination and objects being out of place. I visited a few ceramic shops and exhibitions to get some ideas on how to display my collection. I quickly realised that ceramics have quite a formal way of being displayed and tended to be displayed in a white area, on a white plinth or on a glass shelf. I was looking for something a little less clean and organised. These are some of the photo’s I took at the Contemporary Ceramics Centre and at Contemporary Applied Arts. I also visited the Tate but they had no ceramics of interest on display:

It’s Exhibition Time of Year Again!

So it’s that time of year again where we have to start preparing for our end of year show. We need to raise enough money to make our exhibition possible. I have taken on the role of ‘The Money Man’ as well as obtaining prizes for a raffle, cake selling and helping with fundraising. I will be in charge of looking after the money and recording our incomings and outgoings. I dedicated a whole day this week to phoning and emailing companies all over Banbury to see if they would like to sponsor us or donate a prize for our raffle. So far I have kindly got replies from Compton Verney offering a family ticket to their venue, a gift £50 voucher from WHSmith and a £50 gift voucher from Tesco’s. We have also set up a crowd funding page with a £500 target to help with our setting up costs and to enable us to run workshops for the public.

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Cake Sale at The Banbury Old Town Party

To raise more money for our exhibition I organised for us to run a cake sale and raffle at the Banbury Old Town Party. It was a lovely sunny day and there was a really good community vibe. We sold lots of cakes homemade by our own students and saw people become addicted to our raffle and came back to have another two or three goes. I managed to get some really good donations and we ended up having a table full of prizes.

 

Paper Making

Paper making is another very simple technique i’ve learnt and the possibilities are endless. We made paper from scratch and added all kinds of materials to it including thread, material, magazine cuttings and dye.

Felt Making

I had no idea about the amount of things you can make with felt. I learnt several techniques in a felt making class that I very quickly became fond of. For example, the sausage:

And the pot:

Here are some of the examples I produced and the technique is so simple, very pleased 🙂

Book Making with Stephen Fowler

There are so many different ways to make a book. Today Stephen Fowler a Bookmaking and Rubber Stamping Artist visited our college and gave us a lesson in ‘How to make your own book’. He also bought in some fantastic samples. I didn’t realise there were so many different ways to bind and fold a book. We learnt several different examples which I will put to good use throughout my degree.

Here is an examples of one technique that I learnt today:

Here are some more professional looking books that Stephen brought in to show us, my favourite one is the first one by Dennis Wheatley, there’s just something about the weight and the size thats nice. I like that its bound with old red ribbon too. The cover has an envelope paper feel to it and it looks as though it contains an important document. Inside is a murder mystery and on some of the pages there are little sachets of evidence, brilliant!

 

 

Pop Up Christmas Shops

We decided as a group to set up a Christmas Pop Up Shop in Oxford Brookes University and in our own college in Banbury. For the shop we had to make gifts to sell on the day and hopefully make some money too. I visited a few gift shops to get some ideas of the sort of thing I might like to make, what packaging I could use and how I may display my work, the photos are posted below.

I’m currently working on a project about fairytales and I would like my gifts to be in keeping with this rather than start researching a completely new subject. I chose to make two different gifts, one for boys and one for girls. For the girls I chose to make a mini princess and the pea sculpture with a mini story printed on a scroll and for the boys I chose to make gingerbread man lollipop holders. Unfortunately they didn’t turn out as well as I hoped. I had run out of time to have my products high fired and glazed white so they looked slightly unfinished to me. I decided to make some porcelain Christmas tree decorations to add to my collection as I was worried that my gingerbread and pea items wouldn’t be ready in time.

I thought about my packaging a great deal and decided to go with a parcel look. I thought it is always exciting to open a parcel and find out what is inside. I chose to package my items in a brown card box and tie them with string and include a little label. These were my label designs, I went with the last one.

I didn’t sell very many of my items which was disappointing but now I realise that my target customer would have been children or parents and there weren’t many of those at Brookes or Banbury. If they were being sold in a different place and they had been properly finished maybe I would have sold more. Next time I am involved in a pop up shop I will take my target market into account as well as location and what time I have to make my products. The footfall for both of the pop up shops wasn’t great but we put this down to it being the end of term and Christmas holidays.

Here are some pictures of us in action and also some of the bags that were made as a collaborative project which were sold to raise money for holding future projects like this.

As well as selling and producing my own products at our pop up shop I also helped with logistics, measuring up and organising the layout of the space. I went to the Student Union Square at Oxford Brookes where our shop was being held to take lots of photos and to measure up. I wanted to note the overall size of the space, where the entrances/exits were, whether we could use wall space and what and where we could advertise around the campus. I then drew a plan of the space to work out how much space we could each have. I liaised with the student officer about how many tables and chairs we could use on the day and also what the measurements of the tables were.

Nativity Backdrop for a Local School

I was asked by the school that I previously collaborated with on the eco-friendly garden to paint them a backdrop for their nativity play. Of course I wanted to get involved. They gave me 2 blue king size bed sheets that I then sewed together creating a 15ft backdrop and I was left to my own devices. I got to choose the design and then paint it. It took about 6 hours which is 3 hours longer than I had planned for but these things always take longer than you expect.

Student Design Awards RSA

I decided to enter my eco-friendy, outdoor classroom into the RSA Student Design Awards. There were 12 different categories and I wanted to enter the creative conditions category which was to design an environment that encourages creative thinking. Because I had created an outdoor garden that encourages learning and role-play and included sensory areas I thought it was perfect for this category.

The RSA Student Design Awards is a global curriculum and competition for emerging designers. They challenge students and recent graduates to tackle pressing social, environmental and economic issues through design thinking. They are a globally renowned charity committed to finding innovative, practical solutions to social problems and they do this by running a competition that challenges students and recent graduates worldwide to think differently about design, through tackling briefs focused on real world problems.