All I wanted for Christmas...

Well to start with Happy Christmas all.

I no it might seem odd to be Blogging on Christmas day but this morning I received a rather interesting present. I was given along with lots of lovely things, four copies of The Da Vinci Code which may sound a little strange, seeing as I hate the The Da Vinci Code and think that Dan Brown must write his drafts in crayon.

So why you maybe be asking did my parents buy me four copies? was it a cruel joke? Do they just not no me at all? No, in fact they had remembered a joke a made in the summer about destroying as many copies of DVC as I could and then turning them in to a pieces of art, and they thought it was about time I started.

So to that end I am going to attempt to find a Hundred things to make/do with a copy of DVC that are preferable to reading it. Please feel free to add your own joke at this point.

Oh yeah and I do know there are five copies in the picture the top one is the one I bought and read, I'm never getting those hours back....

Projecting Images

Recently Iouka and I have been playing around with the imagery we have are projecting.

Here are a few of the ideas I have been knocking around.

One of the cool things he introduced me to way using a coloured surface as a sort of light filter. so I made a few slides of the same image and just simply changed the hue.

By far the most effective images out of all the ones I tried were the ones made from my black and white photos, they looked incredible, the grain they were given the and slight hue of the colour printing aged them. We were stood looking at photographs I had taken in the summer and they could have been taken anywhere at any time (Well apart from the copy ofJjuxtapoz and the digital camera.)

Ralph Lauren 4D Light show

As a rule I'm not usually interested in fashion but I was shown this today and it has be one of the most incredible pieces of projection ever. Its just a shame about the handbags....

Rachel Wingfield

This was shown to me at the end of a presentation I gave today, and I thought it was awesome

Sonumbra de Vincy from Loop.pH on Vimeo.

Card Board Cameras

I was doing some research yesterday and found these, they really made me smile so I thought I would share them. They are by a guy called Kiel Johnson.

New Knitted Light

I put this one together last night . I have fallen in love with the ripple stitch! I am planning on making a massive one of these over the next. The only slight problem is that this is going to be to late for my assessment but hey with a bit of luck my tutors might look on here... stranger things have happened...

Projecting Outside

Me and Josh Worrall set up a quick projection piece, just to see how possible it would be to project outside, and as it turns out it is pretty effective and we are hoping that this will led to some more pieces.

Acetate Light

Projection 3

Yeah I no this is my third post on this but I had alot of stuff to get through and I thought it might be easy to manage in small pieces so here we go with the third and final projection post, well at least for now.

There really isn't much else I can say about this work, I think I have already said enough so here are the final few images. I started playing with layering and adding in extra elements as I said I would in projection one.

Projection 2

With my slides in hand and Iouka's projector in its leather bound box I set off to start my projection. It was at this point I realised I hadn't got a clue what I was doing or how to go about doing it, so I did what any normal person would do in this situation and freaked out...

Once I calmed down I covered myself by writing a piece in my reflective journal about the nature of trial and error and that by just trying this Idea I had succeeded regardless of what the outcome was like, and then set about finding someone to save my sorry ass and luckily for me Mr. David Sermon was around, and with his help stuff started to happen.

So after an hours of tidying up and blacking out windows, we were left with a workable space and I "got my projection on" as it were.

Blown up my slides did look pretty good and what was really interesting was the grain of the images, as there had been lazer printed onto acetate the was a very noticeable line running through them. It was almost as if they had been woven... hows that was poetic? The image that is not my crappy sentence.

I've had people tell me these look like all sorts of things from animal skin to boiled sweets, I personally don't really no they remind me of but I don't think that matters, what's far more important to me is that they have sparked discussion and interest. For me as an "Artist" that has always been the important thing, it doesn't matters what meaning I put behind them because an audience will always make up its own minds and I'm quite happy to just make something that makes people excited and want to think for themselves and if I can do this with photos of knitting and a slide projector then all the better.

So enjoy, I had a great time making them and please tell me what you think!

Projections

One of the things I have really wanted to do for a while is set up some sort of projection/ installation piece and I was lucky enough to be given the chance to try one of my ideas out.

The only problem was I only had a day and a half to short it out. Luckily for me my house mate and good friend Josh Worrall aka Iouka has a slide projector, slide cases and has worked out a really easy way to make his own. So armed to the teeth with projection gear, I set about making my first slides.

These are the images I put on my slides, and yeah I am aware they are all slightly different sizes but as the slide case I was using had a rectangular window it really didn't matter. once I had my images all nicely set out in photoshop I simply printed them onto acetate, cut them out and placed they in the slide cases.

Before I set up my piece I thought it would be a good idea to try out the slide. I would have hated to get everything all set up and then find out they would burn out or wouldn't focus etc.

So here we have a couple of examples of my slides in action and I think they look pretty cool, though I think they will need something more added to them to complete the piece, maybe something layered over the top of them or multiple images project over the top of each other or in a sequence. I would also love to get a more modern slide project that I could load my slides in and maybe have them on some sort of timer so they could be played in sequence

Weave light

I got my first couple of weave samples off the loom so I thought I would put them up see what they looked like, turns out they let the prefect amount of light threw, don't you just love it when a plan comes together.

Of course these were just taken quickly, I didn't even iron them before I put them up but still I don't think they look half bad. They just need to be longer!... which will mean spending a lot more time weaving, so back to the loom it is!

I did me a weaving

So by now you may have noticed that I am a knitter, and knit is of course truly awesome but when I got the change to try my hand at tubular weaving I wasn't about to pass it up . Tubular weaving is at base quite a simple idea, it is just a pretty basic double cloth that is only linked at the side of the piece, creating a tube.