Lizzie Hughes was born in Anglesey in Wales. She then moved to London and went to the Slade school of Art and studied upto MFA level. She then did a five year residency at the ACME Fire Station Building in London. She does not stick to one media and has done work installation, video, sound works and performance. She wants to make re representation of structures through scale. She has condesed buildings and huge spaces into forms of text and soundworks.
Jo Ray is based in Newcastle Upon Tyne. She focuses on how we value, dream and occupy space and to investigate the relationship with the viewer and the viewed. She likes to offer alternate views such as changing the scale of objects. Also she studies the desire for idealised and mythological spaces and the perception of something which happens which has previously been a dream or ambition. She explores whether these things live up to expectation or are a dissapointment. She studied BA (Hons) Fine Art at the University of Hull and then MFA Fine Art in Slade School, London. She uses a lot of photography which she digitally prints onto billboards. One of her works “A Common Treasury” is based on a contrast between the countryside and an amusement park close by.
Sarah Jenneson is an Art Director. She has been an Art Director on many music videos and advertisements. She has done advertisements for Samsung, Nokia and Specsavers to name a few and Music Videos for Razorlight, Mika and Tinchy Styder to also name a few. She went to Leeds University and studied Fine Art. She then moved to London and worked in an art shop and through this she made connections which would greatly help her in later life. One of her most prominent adverts is one for Samsung featuring sheep which are wearing LED jackets. Jenneson made the jackets for the sheep. She has to do a lot of project planning and investigating on a project to ensure that it works and sometimes things have to be redone if they are not successful. She did a F.D.I in drafting and art directing at Pinewood Studios which was how she became interested in set design.
Anna Barham takes inspiration from poetic texts and uses a prescribed set of rules. She has previously been inspired by the story of the archelogical discovery of Leptis Magna an ancient Roman city. Barham created a series of drawings charting anagrams of the citys name. The citys name became part of new poetry and prose in Barhams work. Another piece she has created involves a tangram which is a square cut into 7 pieces which can be reformed in various ways to create letterforms, eventually building up into a text. Her interest in anagrams stems from the ability to reveal an unconcious meaning in a word. Barham was born in 1974 and studied at Slade School of Fine Art. She likes to work in a variety of media such as sculpture, performance, video and drawing.
Patrick Ian Hartley is an artist. He began in the field of ceramics which he studied for a degree. He has always focused on changing and manipulating the body. He has made scuptures and ceramic items featuring skeletons, babys in unrealistic poses and aspects of bodybuilding. He does not like drawing and prefers to use collage. He eventually got bored of ceramics and moved in a different direction.
He began to take an interest in a more fashion direction when he got involved in a London gallery. He had to learn how to do pattern cutting and construction of garments in 3 months and developed his own techniques for this because there was not enough time to learn it traditionally. He drew lines on peoples faces and them steamed calico to thier faces to get the shapes. The garments he made were face corsets and they distorted the face. They used many different fabrics from bridal fabric to PVC. The face corsets have been featured in many magazines including Vouge China and have been worn by Lady Gaga. Nick Knight and Simon Foxton have took an interest in the garments and have used them in many photoshoots to manipulate models faces. Fashion became a new career for him.
He them started another project called Project Facade. This was focusing on injured service men who had got facial disfigurements in the war and how they had plastic surgery to make them better. The collection used old military jackets and digital embroidery. The garments explained the history of the service men and thier plastic surgery and were not just garments.
Alice Waudby is an illustrator. She believes that illustration can add depth to text and make it clearer to the reader. Her current project involves painting a set of illustrations which were from her childhood. She has changed them and focused on colour and line and a more modern and less traditional presentation. The illustrations have been hand painted onto Perspex clear sheets and made bigger than the originals. This makes them clean and crisp and allows light to refract though them.
Colin Gray is a commerical fine art photographer. He has done many different jobs in his lifetime including for advertising agencies, design consultancies and record companies.
His most recent project is on his parents and it is called “In Sickness and In Health” and it has been made into a book. Gray has taken pictures of his parents since he was five years old. These photos would be taken at family occasions, and on holidays. He continued these photos all through thier lives documenting thier family events showing thier loving, working, homemaking and playing.
The book “In Sickness and In Health” documents the final stages of his parents lives and shows thier deterioration ending with his mothers death. The photographs show the loss Gray was feeling at the time and helped him make sense of it.
Gray is now the age his parents were when he started taking the photographs and therefore he says he sees his future in thier past.
Neil Moore is a Realist painter who paints images to do with the human body. He has done paintings about cynacism in marriage, pregnancy, body image and cosmetic surgery. He tries to paint the figures life size to make them more relatable to people. He has painted similar realist images in the same style for 15 years. He always uses unusual models to create interest in the images.
To create his paintings he often starts by doing lots of drawings of a model. He then collects the drawings together and decides which should be made into paintings.
He paints people naked becuase he thinks that clothes date the paintings wereas when the models are naked, there is no sense of the date the painting was done. He does not do comissions because he thinks that they compromise his images as they are not done to his specifications and therefore he is often not pleased with them.
I think that this talk was interesting as it was interesting to learn about the process Moore takes when creating his images.
Neil Moore is a realist painter who focuses on the body and human forms, suicide and body image. He has created paintings based on cynicism in marriage, pregnancy, anorexia, and cosmetic surgery. He tries to paint his figures life size as this makes the figures more relatable. He has kept his painting style the same for 15 years and tries to make sure there are no brush strokes showing in his paintings. He does drawings before he creates a painting to help develop the images and then decides which drawings should be made into paintings. He doesn’t do commissions because he believes you end up pleasing someone else instead of yourself which affects the quality of the painting. He uses naked models as he believes that clothes date a painting and being naked avoids this happening. His use of different models makes his images more interesting including an anorexic girl. He only paints women as he finds women much more interesting than men who he perceives as boring.
I thought that his paintings were very realistic and detailed but I found it hard to understand some of the meanings behind them.
Ingird Pollard is a photographer who takes photographs focusing on race and women. She has talken photographs of women and manual trades, the March Against Racism and the Theatre of Black Women and other political issues. She was born in the Caribbean but spent most of her life in London and urban areas in the USA. She looked into how black women felt more out of place in the countryside than they did in urban areas as they are more assosiated with the city and are in extreme minority in the country.
Later on she moved slightly away from race to focus more on the landscapes of the countryside. She looked into the formation of plates and how tectonics form. She was fascinated by how they form over 100s of years and that they cannot be formed in our lifetime. She used thick ink to acheive the affect she wanted for the landscapes and also used natural elements in the photographs such as silver. She then further explored landscapes by creating digital prints, photos featuring towns spreading into the countryside and panoramic countryside. Most of her photos were black and white or black and white and then tinted with colour afterwards.
Another of her projects featured an investigation of childhood and adults. She created photographs of children and adults and the children were featured on one wall and the adults on the other so they both cannot be viewed at the same time. The power relationships between adults and children in the photographs.
She also looked into pubs featuring references to black people such as pubs called “the black boy”. She deeply researched the area and then went travelling around Britain investigating the different pubs. She discovered that some showed racist figures and some showed beautiful figures. She created her own embossed images which display the hidden meaning in the signs. They look like a series of white paintings when go in the room until you look closer.
I thought that this talk had some interesting points and I thought that the landscapes were very interesting and used interesting affects. I also thought that the images featuring the “black boy” pub were interesting because of the fact that they were white to display the hidden meanings.
This design talk was from Louise Riley and it was called from epiphany to infinity. Louise Riley is a sculptor and embroiderer who does a lot of hand embroidery. She explained that she was almost about to give up on art when she found an old mattress in the street and this made her have an epiphany and gave her inspiration for a new project. She then made sculptures from the mattresses which were to represent certain single moments in time. An example of one this is that one of her works was to represent the moment that links your sleeping self to your waking self. Her work also represented relationships between people and the chemical process in which takes two people from meeting to procreating. A common feature in her work is the infinity sign. She has used couples she knows as inspiration and embroidered them onto mattresses. One of her works featured a gay couple and the sculpture represented their desire to have a baby even though it was not naturally possible for the two of them. Riley did a residency in California which lead her to be influenced by landscapes. She gave up her studio as she feels isolated working in a studio and prefers to be out in the world for example she once created works in a shop window for a window display. I think that this talk was interesting as her work was very different and unique and she had put a lot of thought behind it and each piece had its own individual meaning and she explained the meanings very well.
This design talk was from Paul Hartnett who is a photographer and fashion forcaster who documents street style for websites such as WGSN. He has been doing this since 1976. He atteneds many events to gather photographs such as London fashion week, Leeds festival and graduate fashion shows and photographs people at these events who are wearing different and interesting clothing.
When he was a child he lived in an old peoples home and this influenced he interest in fashion becuase all the residents had old clothes in thier wardrobes from years ago and he was allowed to look though them.
He was inspired by punks such as Soo Catwoman and Sid Vicious who lived nearby him when he was young. The first photograph he ever took was of Soo Catwoman at Bang Disco in 1976. He then became interested in clubbing especially on the gay scene and started photographing people in the clubs who were wearing outrageous clothes. He was also inspired by the New Romantics such as Steve Strange, Bowie and Kraftwerk. He also became linked with Boy George and Marilyn and icons such as Leigh Bowery.
I thought that the talk was interesting was I am interested in New Romantic and Punk music and fashion.
