Structure Project Evaluation

After my initial visit to the museum, I was mainly struck by the story of industry that echoed through many of the displays as I felt it directly related to the present situation of this ex industrial town and for this project I wanted to make something in the now and be inspired by its current landscape. 

Its nearest land mark; The Bennerly Viaduct or " The Iron Giant" as it is locally known, stands as a monument to this golden age of industry that included coal, iron, lace and textile manufacture. Ilkeston also had a modest tourist industry as a spa town with the discovery and exploitation of natural mineral waters , Ilkeston baths attracted health tourists to the town before its decline and closure in 1900 due to contamination of the waters by mining activities.

Like many ex industry towns it has become run down, its identity is in the past and its industry is lost.

Its very similar to the ex mining town where I grew up. In my experience people from these poorer places are made to feel like less, made to expect less and are statistically proved to achieve less across all social indicators than people living in more affluent areas.

Regeneration and investment seems to be minimum apart from the church yard there are not many green spaces within the town, however it does boast some beautiful surrounding country side and rural areas along the Erewash.

   
After the historical nature of the lace project, for this project I was wanting to make something more based in the now, so visually I took my inspiration from visiting the town and the viaduct and gathering photographic research and getting a feel for the place.

As usual I started this project with many possible lines of investigation, a lot of them I either didn't pursue or at least not to a conclusion. Other ideas I have banked for another time. One of the biggest learning curves for me with this project was editing. The majority of my work was in print which is a naturally prolific medium so a real part of the work was in editing and collating the large amount of prints.

 In regards to the editing of ideas, time wise, its not possible to pursue each lead and you can't really know how good an idea or technique will work unless you follow it, so its about being deceive and intuitive for me in terms of following an approach and identifying workable ideas.

For example, I had initially wanted to combine textiles with this project, in the idea of softening a structural work, to create contrast however once I started making the box prints, the initial results were encouraging, the combinations of form and texture I could create with this method were very exciting to me so I focused in on this technique quite early, and that gave me time to experiment.

It fits so with the theme of structure in terms of process and results- deconstructing an existing structure to create a direct print that resembles that structural form.

Using dis-guarded packaging here is my way of communicating industry and waste, the outer shell, of making something with nothing, a reflection of how this town has become run down.The textures for me were representing of peeling paint, the row of boxes a street of terraced house, miners cottages, they also had the feel of being reflected against a body of water as the box shapes repeated.

The prints with groups of boxes look more like a town scape, 

The town scape print from the exhibition is layered with the map, purposefully in muted  shades of green, the boxes could be houses or an Ariel view of the Erewash fields.

The map is in gold, as tonally it works with the green, its an important consideration for me to make work that is not only conceptual but good to look at as I try to show beauty can be found in all kinds of places, zooming in on a tiny detail, colour or texture or zooming out to an abstract form.

The gold on the map contextually is to signify the golden age of industry past, the map highlights the river, rail roads that would have took the produce out of town and brought in the money Appling the map print to the boxes is an attempt to anchor the image to the place.

 

 Exploring pressure on the printer, application of paint and composition in more detail in the hopes of being able to re produce certain results more reliably and make more focused, predictable prints after an initial experimental stage. Looking at abstract representations of landscape.

The boxes are interchangeable and extendable with many possibilities of composition and arrangement.

My objective/ intention for this project was to create work around the them of the physical structures of the town along with the structure of industry and the traces this leaves on the structure of the town.

I visited and photographed the town and the viaduct as well as looking at maps of the area. I was informed by the general theme of the museum which focus' a lot on the industrial past of the town.

For me this town reminds me a lot of the town I grew up in. I was trying to highlight the beauty of the places the area of the viaduct the rural areas of natural beauty in contrast to the town which looks like many ex industry towns in north Nottingham.

The idea behind the box prints is the familiarity along with the ambiguity .












The nature of print making means you can produce a lot of work from the source prints. Cardboard prints/ Collagraphs do have a limited life span and the quality of the print you get changes with each press, this is something I love about this technique, that each work is so individual, you can control it to some extent but will often get a lot of surprises along the way, This is the aspect that pushed me on to make so much work, ts addictive and joyful, I enjoy the colours and textures and have never made work like this before. The most difficult part of this process then is in the editing.

It was in the editing that I got the idea for the concertina structure, or at least an idea to make some kind of collage. There were lots of prints that didn't make the grade for reasons such as the wrong composition, finger prints, marks, stains, uneven ink coverage etc. However within these reject prints there were so may beautiful textures and colours, that could never be reproduced in the exact same way and I didn't want to discard them so I saved these sections. Always in my mind is the Japanese technique of kintsugi (repairing broken objects with gold).

The concertina work is about the beauty of repair and imperfections, and again the idea of reusing and not wasting. I get a similar feeling looking at run down buildings with layers of time in the paint and plaster, the repair and the damage, and effects of time. Its also about transforming from 2D to a 3D simple structure.  I'm very happy with how this has turned out, it feels like a small scale prototype  Id like to it in a larger scale that you could walk around, another idea to bank.

I researched a few areas of interest, a couple of commercial artist working in print, one who works with card board and one who works in lino creating prints of famous Leicester landmarks, which teamed together sums up my intention of creating something evocative of the Ilkeston townscape/ landscape using print from card board.

I looked at the way artist use physical structures in their works to evoke emotion and tell a personal story such as Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois

I looked at artists making  architectural forms in reaction to their environments such as Rachel Whitered and Louise Elveson.

I also looked at brutalist architecture, both as high end architectural art form  and more relevantly to cheaply build town car parks and supermarket structure etc in places too poor to replace them.

Also looked at more traditional landscapes by David Hockney and how his use of exaugurated colour and shapes to communicate the distinctive features of the place he is representing.

 

Again I found it highly motivating to be involved in a live project. Making work for an exhibition with a clear deadline is helpful to organise use of time. Focus was on producing and presenting work, I documented along the way, and now after the exhibition feel I can fully reflect on the work as a whole.

 I still prefer the making to the documenting, but understand the importance of both.

In terms of communicating my idea, whoever I spoke to about my work saw a town scape within it, apart from the concertina which is more abstract, how ever as a group of 3 works they all inform each other, the textures from the prints and gold leaf is present in the concertina as well as physical structural form, its this piece that links the works together.

I used a multi colour pallet of muted, layered tones. In the prints over 3 frames I was mind full that each print was working in a different shade and that they flowed and blended together. I feel these colours, represent aged things that were once bright, the layers of paint and decay on a building and also reflective of moss and the green fields in the surrounding ares. I find these colour combinations calming also how you feel in nature looking at he textures of tress.

I had intend to use more red and orange brick towns but it felt a little too obvious, I didn't like it as much as these muted tomes. I think the mixture of colour makes it more abstract, like the buildings becoming wild surroundings. Colour for me is quite intuitive and is very motivating when making work. 

Moving forward this project has further increased my interest and knowledge in print, especially the use of collagraph, direct prints and taking traces as part of site specific projects.

Had I had more time on this project further development would have been to layer more prints together and further explore dry point printing.

 I love the results that can be achieved by applying high pressure to the printing press to lift traces. My last piece of development for this project was developing printing in lace to create abstract landscapes, using colour as the main anchor point in recognising the composition.