Photography

We have also been working with photography. Our brief was to also work along the same theme of Headlines and Stories. I was to take 8 photos a week for 3 weeks, total of 24 photos altogether, and then select our top 8. I found selecting the final ones difficult!!!

 

I started thinking of theft and crime, and staged a scene of me trying to break into a car (my own car may I add!!!). And I also was told I was trying to break in the wrong way!!! Ah well, at least I know I'll never make a career out of stealing cars!! I also staged climbing into my house. I made them black & white as they looked so much better than in colour. What do you think?

 

 

 

 

I then wanted to go further with the crime theme, and gave a lot of thought of what types of things are stolen from us. One that stuck out for me is dignity. This can be taken away by the way we are treated. Unfortunately, people get abused and treated badly within institutions in society. There are so many types of institutional abuse, and we hear more and more frightening stories every day. I took some photos of some institutions as a representation of this theme. I'm not saying that any abuse actually occurred in any of these buildings specifically. They are only used here as a symbol for my theme.

 

 

 

 

 

These are only some of the photos I took. This final image really made an impact on me. This is a confessional box in a deconsecrated church. This building is just locked up and not in use anymore. Thankfully I was able to get to photograph it. When looking at the confessional box I felt uneasy. The way the curtain is sitting made me feel like something wrong happened here. It's like there is a gap in the curtain for you to peek in, and it also feels like you shouldn't look. I will work with this image again.

 

 

Just going back to the theme of robbing the eye out of your head, I took these just for fun! I wanted to use real eyeballs and had it organised with my local butcher that I could get some sheep's eyes, but time was against me! Instead I was lucky enough that it was around Halloween and got chocolate eyes. Not quite the same effect but I like the photos anyway. Real eyeballs for another day....

 



Headlines & Stories

 

 

Back to college!! The brief we got is about Headlines & Stories - depicting what interests me personally in the news. After brainstorming and sieving through many ideas, I went with the theme of theft and crime. Generally, since the recession, crime rate has risen and thieves are becoming more brave and cheeky!! Nothing seems to be sacred at all anymore.These thieves don't seem to consider the fact that people are struggling and working really hard to try and pay bills. These criminals have an air of entitlement and believe that there is nothing wrong with taking what is not theirs. As the saying goes - they would nearly rob the eye out of your head!!!

 

That's where I came up with the idea of a print. I thought of a handful of eyeballs to represent the multitude of thefts from various people. This is the image I went with. Because I was working with etching I had to work out how to etch the tonal qualities on the plate. Here are the various backgrounds I played with:

 

 

 

I ended up going with the first one. After preparing my plate with hard ground on the front (to scratch my image onto) and bitumen on the back to prevent the back of the plate during etching, I then scratched out my image.

 

 

I then starting the etching process by attaching a strip of brown tape to the back of the plate and a piece of stick at the end (this would allow me to dip the plate in and out of the acid without touching the plate itself). I dipped it in the acid for 5 minutes, then washed and dried it. I blocked out areas of the plate where I wanted the lines to be light (painted on bitumen). I dipped the plate again for a further 10 minutes and repeated the process. I continued this until the plate had been dipped for 40 minutes in total. This gave me different variations of tonal lines. This is what the plate looked like after etching:

 

 

 Next I started printing!!! Here are a few examples of how my prints came out:

 

This is printed with a very deep red. I liked how it came out

 

I printed this in black ink, but painted with watercolours in the background. I think this works really well. The hands with eyes really stands out.

 

With this one I used a piece of acetate and etched out the iris' of the eyes and inked them in various colours and printed it on top of the print

Here I cut out the iris' and placed various coloured pieces of transparency celophene. This was lit from behind and doesn't show the colours very well - sorry!

 

Here I played with the form known as chine colle - a process combining pieces of paper to the image with spray glue. The various pieces of paper I used were stories from the newspapers about theft. I also used a little tissue paper too. This particular process didn't work well with my theme here as it took away from the actual image I had created, but I'm glad I tried it. Hopefully I'll try it again on another project.

 

This final image I put up is one of my favourites. I inked up the plate with red ink, mixed some blue with transparency and rolled up the plate. I then put it through the press. I think it works as the image seems to stand out from the background
 

 The main artist I looked at for style of image is Philip Guston. I love his almost cartoon like images. Here are a few examples of his work:

 

Here is also a youtube piece on Philip Guston if you're interested. I really love his work.

 

Philip Guston - Short Documentary

 

 

There's also a Limerick artist that reminds me of Philip Guston's work. He's Mike Culliney and I think his work is brilliant! Here are a couple of images that I love and I've also attached a link to his blog if you want to check him out:

 

 

Here is the link to his blog. He's well worth checking out!!! Mike Culliney's Blog



More Woodblock

I played around with colour today. I rolled out some yellow and red ink and blended them. I then rolled out my separate blocks and combined the image. I really like these. I think they work really well and you get the feeling of intense heat:

Woodblock

A new project! This is a relief print project regarding storytelling. We were to pick a story relevant to ourselves and put this into a single image.

I went with the story of what happened one night after work. I was staying in a 4th floor flat in Limerick with my flatmates. We had some wine and didn't finish the bottle and decided to cork it. Anyway - we went to bed and the next thing I knew was I woke up with one of my flatmates banging on the door and shouting. The flat was on fire. The t.v. had gone up in flames. My flatmate woke up when the wine bottle exploded from the heat. We used the fire extinguishers from the flat and downstairs flat too. Once the fire was out I noticed on the shelf beside the t.v. was a can of Zippo lighter fluid. Thankfully the fire was out before it reached it!!

So, I went and worked on an image for this story. The main elements were the t.v., the wine bottle, lighter fluid and flames.

Here are images of final prints:

Update on more collagraph

This is a mix of cut up prints. I really like the effect.

Here I worked on the three main colours and my blood's reaction to eating chocolate. Sugar levels soar, then drop, then balance out once I eat something healthy. You can't really see the textures well on these images, but the collagraph board had tile adhesive on it and I crumpled some tin foil and dabbed it on. This was in relation to the red, high levels where they were spikey and rough. The lower part of the board had tissue paper glued on - orange area for low levels. The tissue was put on drooping on the board. Across the centre of the board I put ribbon on. This was showing a smooth baseline. I then used woodglue for the 'lifeline'. I really love how they turned out!

With an extra shade of green

Here I just tried it out on white card just to see the actual texture.

More Collagraph

Next I wanted to play with the colours that were relevant to my theme. I rolled out green, orange & red and put them onto acetate to do a monoprint first.

I then cut out some dry point images and inked them up. I then put them on top of the monoprint. To try and bring it together as a collagraph I then blocked off sections (red & orange) and printed the pineapple plate on top. I don't think the dry point parts worked at all, so I stopped with them.

Next I just worked with the monoprint and the collagraphs.

Spaghetti on green

 

Now I am working on the blending of colours to show the gradual change and fluctuation. Will update once I have something to show.

Collagraph

Next we tried collagraph. This is basically building a collage image on a board and printing it. Making the boards was great fun. Colours needed to be relevant too. The colours I used were green (healthy, balanced levels), red (high levels), orange (low levels).

I first created a board - a pineapple with a grid. The grid is to represent the structure and organisation that has to go behind making sure the right foods are prepared etc. (sorry for sounding boring about it - just need to explain my rationale).

This board was made out of paper, pva glue, masking tape, wood glue carborundum, tile adhesive and french polish to seal it:

Here are some images that I printed:

While rolling up, the impression of the pineapple stayed in the ink on the roller. I rolled this out and this is what came out - I like it.

Next I made a plate of a strawberry. I used a paper doiley, tissue paper and acrylic paint, sealed then with french polish:

I didn't really like how the strawberry ones came out, but glad I tried them anyway to see how the textures looked.

Then I cut up some boards and put some different textures on them - tile adhesive, wood glue, carborundum, tissue paper, tin foil and masking tape. I just wanted to play with them just to see how they would print out.

This is to imply spaghetti

The top part has 6 indentations enclosed which is to symbolise the 6 times a day to eat - confinement.

I just played around with reversing the images and seeing what would happen. This was done on thicker paper too.