24/10/2018 - DRAWING WORKSHOP

This workshop was a bit of a weird one for me as I felt it lacked direction. On all the other previous workshops on the course, there was a brief which I felt galvinised the group into producing outcomes which were thought provoking and challenging. This however felt more like a nostalgic reminder on the existance of simple drawing techniques which, for me in my practice personally, had never been forgotten in the first place.


I had picked up a couple of thin rectangular double glazed frames off the side of the road, and had been considering ideas of what I might do with them for a time. So I took this workshop as an opportunity to sketch an idea of what I might use them for.

I had the idea of creating a scene with genuine visual depth by using the thickness of the glass and painting onto either side. In two layers this could produce a visual trickery allowing underwater objects to move slightly in their habitat.

By creating a vitrine of the two glass panes, I made connections beween the themes of Mark Dion which I was exploring in ever greater depth for my dissertation. By subverting the archival and educational, Dion allows his audience to reach their own realisations about the topic broached. I imagined the glass incased in a wooden frame like some specimen or diorama of a seldom visualised truth.

I had seen an open call for an exhibition by Louisa Marriott around the theme 'Everything Wrong With the World Today'. Although this is far too broad a consideration for a single piece of artwork, I do believe a lot of our problems come from a lack of understanding about the interconnectedness of life. If you do something in one place, there will be knock on effects in some way with every other thing around it.

That is represented in this piece by showing a normally unconsidered cross section of both sides of the coin around an oil rig. The oil rig is obviously a symbol of human tension on the environment. The rig provides oil which is absolutely essential to modern human life, and is also a feat on human engineering in itself, aswell as containing a small capsule of community in offshore workers. Yet the potentially disasterous consequences of oil spilling onto open water are indisputable, and an interesting site of interplay between the modern necessities of human culture and the apocalyptic consequences of such interventions gone awry.

I was also hinting at parallels between the iceberg cross-section motif which warns of how icebergs are always much bigger beneath the surface than ontop, and actually much more dangerous to passing ships than they appear. The same could also be said of our upcoming ecological downfall on the modern psyce; objects in the mirror may infact be closer than they appear.