Planning and Piece

The next part of the year 2 summer project was to design and make. We had to look closely at the material processes of our chosen artists and then use elements of their visual language to make new pieces of work. Through this we needed to consider how our artists begin their work and how they gather their source material. For Wolfgang Tillmans, I found this was primarily through documenting and recording the everyday, along with new perspectives of experiments through photography and collected items.

We were then instructed to develop from this influence while also considering the context that we live in and how that informs and gives a different perspective to the ideas taken from our chosen artist. This included experimenting different mediums but ultimately the artist acting as a guide, and not an end point. MAKE WORK that imaginatively responds to this question of what makes an influence a creative input into your work. 

Spider diagram of key aspects I gained from his work; from the subject of the photograph to his style. I wanted to capture my point of view and my perspective but with ‘his subjects’ and his style.

I decided to not do a ‘final piece’ but rather a collection and to display it how Wolfgang Tillmans does – sporadically on the gallery walls through an uncontrolled mass of images. I decided not to create a ‘final piece’ as I wanted this to be an open-ended project, allowing further creative flow.

Above: seven videos of several images showing ink drops dispersing in water. This helped me to realise the difficulty and uncontrollability of ink and water. (I also have more respect now for how Tillmans beautifully captured these.)

Above: Background inspiration from one of the ‘ink and water’ pieces of Wolfgang Tillmans. I enjoyed the peacefulness of the backgrounds of these pieces, however the detail is the part I wanted to gain most, especially with the other photography and drawing pieces that are being completed.

I wanted to concentrate on the detail of pieces, both photography and drawing. The other aspect that I wanted to concentrate on was the unique perspective that Tillmans has within his work. I took my own photographs in my own perspective, and imitating Tillmans perspective:

I decided to draw one of the photographs that I had taken around the university. This was to show that I had understood the detail of the image and the photography that I had taken in relation to Tillmans photography and perspective.

Above: Possible sketches of photographs to convert into another medium.

I had chosen the photograph of grass with a blurry and out of focus background and a clear foreground with grass seeds and leaves. This, I believe shows my perspective as I like to look at the detail of things and archive that detail, like Tillmans archives and uses a unique perspective with his photographs. I did not want to use a ‘city’ photograph or one of the other natural photographs as I did not believe that these could have shown the complexity in a drawing. The piece I submitted is a collection of the photographs and the drawing that I completed, displayed in the sprawled style of Wolfgang Tillmans exhibitions.

I would have liked to do more for the piece, however I also enjoy the simplicity of the display and the complexity of the images that are displayed.

Seminar comments:

In today’s seminar comments on the piece included: the use of (negative) space between the images allows to draw a link between them while being able to see each of them individually. Another comment was on the links between the images such as the water and the ink, the fluidity and the printing onto paper, the linear lines and stacking in the mushrooms and palettes. Someone did mention that the washing-up liquid stuck out too much for them and almost brands that image, but Tina questioned whether it was supposed to do this. Another person said that the drawing was powerful because it was in the middle surrounded by a galaxy of complementing images. It was then said that it was hyper-realistic and this made a further impact on the level of detail of the piece. One improvement that I took on was to move it off of the brick as with the comparison of the images, people started to compare the images themselves with the bricks. This especially included the size of the images and what they were, and also comparing it to the switches that were underneath and weren’t part of the piece, but were still very close. I decided to move the images to a different room where there was a blank wall and more space to experiment with this, and found it looked more imposing on the blank wall and without electrical boxes immediately underneath.