Tag: Unit 2

I started writing down interactions I have with nature as questions and illustrating some ideas in my sketchbook.

I created these large illustrations. The intention with these works is to ask the audience, whoever they are, about their own interactions with nature, and make them evaluate or reevaluate their own relationship.

I made prints on bamboo of each image, bamboo is a more environmentally friendly material than other printable material available. I documented them in a public and non-public setting.The question that I had following making these prints is how will this work meet the audience?

So with that question in mind I have made a proposal for these works to be on billboards, on the tube/ in the urban settings. I think materiality is really important to the work which is why I have followed the physical route instead of digital.

Formidable Shrubs put me in a good mindset for starting the research paper, which I called “the representation of nature in art and design”. The aim was to explore a variety of examples of nature use in art. This was the conclusion. (read extract). Which changed and clarified my intention with this work. The next step for me was how I can use my work to help the audience re-evaluate their relationship with nature. Up until this point I think I was slightly confused by my own intention, there was the idea of using nature as a tool, how humans interact with nature but there was nothing grounding the works, the narrative didn’t exist yet. I wanted to create a paper where the form impacted the message, so it’s printed on seed paper and the reader is encouraged to plant the paper after reading.

I also had the idea of presenting them in outdoor settings and documenting the results of what nature would do to paper. This is a proposal for a longer project where I use the seed paper used in my research paper and leave the work outdoors for a prolonged period of time, in the hope that it sprouts wildflowers. 

This is an example of a print on seedpaper.

These drawings followed on from both the research paper and triangulate 1, they took influence from the formidable shrubs drawings but I added colour and changed the scale. I used a variety of materials to print on, such as recycled paper size a2, thick card to create the small concertina proposals, and seed paper. In the illustrations themselves I started adding in elements such as the lines of a fence and the note taking. 

I made all of the drawings into an overlapping book, which I think is unsuccessful as a piece, this is due to the fact it reads as a catalogue of stand alone illustrations and not as a coherent piece of work. The pieces still lacked the narrative but I liked the scale of the larger images, so as a further iteration I thought about how these pieces would be interacted with.

This idea is a proposal for a larger piece where you would walk amongst these images, like a screen.

In my last blog post I used the words “plant hybrids” by plant hybrids I mean, the shapes I began seeing in the curated images of different parts of plants merging together. The idea of telling a story without using human characteristics in the illustrations became quite exciting for me. The thin paper in my sketchbook was useful because you can see the next drawing through it, this is something I embraced and took forward to my next exploration of this idea. It made me think of the power of nature and the chaos you experience walking through a rural setting. I realised here that whilst my broader question was about how humans interact with nature in general, my zoomed in question was how can I use plant illustrations to explore the power and chaos of nature.

That’s where this book Formidable Shrubs came from. With a focus on materiality and medium use to explore the theme of chaos in nature. I think this project was successful and unsuccessful simultaneously. The material choices were helpful in moving my thinking forward and making me question how I could make the form of work engage with the line of enquiry. Thinking about chaos and power also made me think about Romanticism which was important to my research paper. I think what’s unsuccessful is that I could have made further iterations of this project. This is just ink drawings on tracing paper, I question what could have happened if I used different kinds of thin paper or added colour. I missed out here because I feel like it could have had an impact on the intention of the work.

I collected things like sticks and rainwater, and I used rubbings of leaves and bark. The drawings in my sketchbook, on the left, are done with chalk, pastel and rubbings- on a leaf and a tree. The drawing on the right is drawn with a sharpened stick, rainwater and charcoal ink. I thought this would be useful for my thinking, however I actually found it limiting. Again, I decided to break up my practise here and stop illustrating to re-root the work. 

So I made this book. I collect images all the time, often of examples of human-centric nature, such as weeds growing through a pavement or a tree growing through a fence. I randomly placed all of these images into a document and the weird layouts and messy pages made me think about chaos in nature which took my thought process to plant hybrids.

Over summer I took my sketchbook with me everywhere. I started loosely and quickly illustrating and taking notes of the things I saw around me. I feel that drawing in situ really helps me engage with the subject in a way that taking a photo doesn’t.  This carried on for the whole of summer, some of the drawings were successful and some of them were less so but all of them were useful in taking my thinking further on the subject of human interaction with nature. Taking in some human elements such as the umbrella or the wall was also quite interesting to me. I started writing on the bottom of the images to help engage the audience and create a narrative with the illustrations. So my broader line of inquiry at this point was still how do humans interact with nature, which made me question my own interactions with nature. I was reading and watching a lot of David Hockney interviews and I found the way he speaks about looking and drawing particularly exciting. With the aim to carry on really looking and illustrating I wanted to see how I could use nature as a tool and device within my practise. So the next step for me here was wanting to use nature as a medium.

This is the self portrait I ended up with. A little plant/ human hybrid sitting down.

During my surgery recovery I couldn’t really move much, which I suppose is to be expected when you’ve had your torso cut open. Also my moods were super up and down with lots of emotions etc. etc. etc. But I did manage to make a few drawings in my little sketchbook. I changed my medium, I didn’t really want to be drawing intricate things with a black pen anymore, I wanted to be making things that expressed how I was feeling, which quite frankly was really terrible and the surgery for me had been quite trauma inducing so I had a few things to figure out here. It was helpful so it was successful, I needed to make these drawings to be able to move forward with my work. I don’t like the pieces, they make me feel sad but I am glad that I made them.

I enjoyed the looseness of the oil pastel I had used in my sketchbook so I wanted to set the tightness of the previous illustration free, I drew over it with the loose oil pastels, ending that section of this project, breaking my practise and allowing it to move forward with a new intention. I wanted get far away from the introverted self-reflective illustrations and explore how I could create a narrative with plant characters. Important to note I also wanted to escape anthropomorphising them. My broader enquiry became about questioning the interaction between humans and nature and how I could use nature representation to investigate that relationship. 

Using different methods of drawing like, ink, oil pastel, colouring crayon, pencil and chalk meant I could quickly document ideas. I set myself some rules like not taking the pen off the paper and giving myself time limits on the sketches.

These animations are both works in progress to see how I could develop the plant/human characters and what kind of narratives I could create with them. Animation is a new tool for me so it can take quite a lot of time. I enjoy making the different frames, however to communicate what I wanted to with these I struggled with time limits.

The character in both of them, the same as with the 100 screen grabs, is a self portrait and reflects my feelings to an illness I have and will be having surgery for shortly. I realise that this work isn’t accessible because I am reluctant to talk about the issue at hand.

100 somethings in a week is a lot of somethings. I looked over my elaborate project and took inspiration from an animation I made from collaged drawings. It was several different parts of plants that made a character who moves in a peculiar way. The petals fold and hide the middle section. I enjoyed the strange movements and that the plant took on a personality and character, this is why I began adding further elements to plant drawings and let them evolve into their own characters.

In my one hundred screen grabs project I made digital and physical illustrations of anthropomorphic plants and created texts from note taking and stream of conscious writing. Taking reference from the surrealist method of automatic drawing, I created one hundred illustrations without putting emphasis on the meaning or overthinking. It was a visual exercise and creating these iterations allowed for my thinking and work to move forward out of its comfort zone and into something more exciting. The form the characters have taken are a self portrait for example the sunflower with hobbit feet draws reference from memories and different symbolic moments in my life. The duality of the illustrations seems important for allowing the project to grow. The cheese-plants probably come from the fact that my cheese-plant takes over my house and wont stop growing, I think this is an interesting personal lens to look through at the start of this project. 

The overarching interest in my works is nature and how humans interact with it. The misunderstanding, the disconnect, the ignorance and/or the naivety. My position as a creative exploring these themes is not as someone who has the answers, I don’t have the ability to transcend language and understand plants in any way other than as a human. My position therefore is that of a researcher exploring how I can use design tools to begin to unpack this complex topic. 

I will be using illustration and animation to progress this project further. Considering how different elements of the illustrations create duality and how the pairing of human and plant parts opens a further conversation. I think testing different styles and exploring the ambiguity of the characters created in the screen grabs in relation with written elements from my note-taking exercises will lead to further questions and iterations by creating a new dialogue and environment. I am interested in the way text and image is discussed in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, in Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage how the exploration of how message can change though medium. How Jenny Holzer’a application of found text to subvert or alter the meaning of the words and how she cleverly investigates this through her work. There are several essays from Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World that discuss topics aligned with the initial prompt. 

Brief

Moving away from self- reflective illustrations and using ‘nature’, specifically plants as a prompt, reflect on the illustrations in the 100 iterations project explore how illustration, animation and note-taking can take this work into new territory and how the different media impacts the message.