Tutorial with Desmond

Desmond has never seen my work before so it was exciting to hear a fresh perspective on my work. 

We talked about incorporating folklore into my work to perhaps give it some context and a storyline. I like the idea of local folklore and Desmond suggest looking at 'Charles Freger's Wilder Mann', which has been suggested to me before, and 'Mummers, Maypoles & Milkmaids: A Journey Through the English Ritual Year'.

We also talked about my plans for puppets and how I could make the most out of the performative qualities of them by watching the animals we are creating in real life and studying their specific movements. All of this will then allow me to create a 'realistic' interpretation of the animal. I plan to look at Joseph Beuys 'I like America and America likes me (1974)' to begin thinking about the connection between me and the animal. 

Drawing Workshop

This year the drawing workshop was about developing our own need for drawing. Why do we draw? What do we draw for? 

Last year I worked a lot on developing my 2-D drawings into 3-D sculptures and I really enjoyed the direct link between the two. Even though I was doing this I've never really seen drawing as a fundamental aspect of my work but maybe its time I start realising their importance. My drawing style is quite fun as I like to use bold colours and crayons and exaggerate a particular aspect of an object or person if I am drawing them. I have so many ideas for potential costumes and characters and I think I need to start visualising them in drawings even if the work itself never materialises. 

I picture an upward motion. 

tutu? tootoo? tutoo?

During the summer I had a dream that I was wearing an luminous green dress made out of tutu material and it completely encompassed my body in its tulle. Since this dream I have been thinking about the tutu and how they are relatively quick and simple to make as they require little materials and no stitching. Tutus also have strong connections with ballet and dancing which 

I began making tutus out of brightly coloured netting by looping and tying strips round rope and ribbon. My idea is to make multiple tutus (must think of another name for to me they aren't tutus), that tie around different parts of the body in order to completely cover it in netting to create a sort of mad colourful tutu-suit! For the first green one I had I two slightly different colours of green that were also slightly different in texture. One was netting and the other was alot tighter weave so it has a less fluid movement. The different materials add a depth and texture that help it to look fuller. One of the reasons I like working with netting is because it is the sort of material that has a life of its own; even when you have stopped moving it continues to move of its own will making it kind of ethereal, which is why I made the pink piece purely out of netting and not the thicker weave material. 

I hung them up on my studio wall with drawn arms coming out the sides for the 2nd and 3rd year group crit and its interesting to see them hung and not on a body like this. I drew the arms partly to be slightly funny and also because I don't have a mannequin I thought this might be a good way to visualise it on a person as it very difficult to see things on yourself when you are not in possession of a mirror. I think that they work as a hanging sculpture as well as on the body although I definitely prefer them on a body as they begin to move and dance and have fluidity. Each 'tutu' ties around a different part of the body, but when you move around they are prone to falling down so maybe there is a better way to attach them to the body. 

My intention is to create multiple 'tutus' that cover the body from the neck down and to really push the idea of extremes - more is more is more! Then to wear this costume in a variety of situations - not so much a performance just wearing it doing everyday things. Going back to last years works I would still love to wear a costume in a gallery environment - an art work looking at an artwork. I love the idea of inhibiting movement or restricting the senses which is something I want to play with in future work. In the 2nd and 3rd year group crit it was suggested that instead of a mannequin I could use the greek sculptures around uni which I think would be hilarious. Imagine walking past a beautiful and flawless greek sculpture only it was covered in brightly coloured tutus and a crazy hat or something? It would definitely make you smile at least. I think thats what I want my work to bring to the audience. If not a sense of fun a smile at least! Harriet also suggested in the group crit wearing it at the private view of her group exhibtion responding to colour 100 Levels at Nunns Yard in November, as she has invited the audience to wear bright colours to compliment the show. I also think it would be funny to wear it in really mundane and everyday situations like going to macdonalds or going clothes shopping. 

2nd & 3rd year group crit

Andrew Logan - jeweller, sculptor, performance artist

Charles Freger - Wilder mann 

Empty dress book - about the interpretation and lack of the body in clothing

It was suggested as I don't have a mannequin in the studio that I could go around the uni and dress up the greek sculptures in the tutus as this would be a good way of seeing how it interacts on the body and it would also be quite comical. Harriet also suggested that I come along to the private view of her 100 Levels exhibition at Nunns Yard in November, as she wants the audience to come along wearing bright colours. This would be a good opportunity to document the costume in an everyday (ish) environment. 

TESLA'S TIME MACHINE 20/10/18

EVALUATION OF COSTUME

The decision to wear a wig and paint my face with a lightning bolt was purely because I think hair and make up really help to bring any costume together. Unusual or different hair and make up allow you to create the illusion of another personality which goes hand in hand with costume. I wanted it to look a little like the plasma ball had flowed through the hat and into my body but I am not sure this came across. The chose a white wig because I thought if that had happened, my hair probably would've turned white.  Overall I am not too pleased with the way that the costume ended up. I have felt very unmotivated and dissociated with university at the beginning of this year and I this had led to me managing my time badly and not putting the work into this costume. I didn't allow myself time for experimentation which meant I could not develop my vision into fruition. If I had given myself more time I would have incorporated more glow in the dark elements including more lights throughout the outfit. I am pleased with how the hat turned out though, as people at the event really engaged with the plasma ball and wanted to play with it throughout the night. However, the charge on the ball ran out halfway through the night, which was frustrating as obviously there was no USB plug socket to charge it. Practically the costume worked, I was very warm because of the layers underneath and I was able to dance and go to the toilet easily so that was successful. Both the jacket and the hat got a little destroyed during the night. To get into the different rooms of the event (not via the time machine) you had to duck underneath pallets so i kept knocking my hat off. The jacket sleeve ripped - probably because of bad stitching - but in a way I like this. It sort of symbolises the way that events like this - festivals and halloween and carnivals - are only a temporary celebration. Nothing is meant to last forever and for that one weekend or one night everyone comes together and it doesn't matter if material things don't survive. I also think its very fitting as the ripped jacket and broken hat just mean that my character had got caught in between times and the rips are just souvenirs from my travels in time. Sarah talked about in my tutorial whether this was art or whether it was a costume and for me, whilst I usually think that art and design are fluid and that there are no set boundaries, this piece doesn't push those boundaries at all. I feel it is a costume that had a set purpose for a set event. Is that the difference? Does art live on but design has an expiry date?

Arriving at the event it is clear something unique is going down. I feel completely and immediately immersed in a world where everyone's in various states of Steampunk-esque attire - some have stepped straight out of victorian England whereas others have just stepped off a spaceship from the year 3000. We pitch our tent in the disappearing light, the setting sun giving a sense of anticipation of what is to come. I walk past a grounded hot air balloon where I am greeted by security - a black and neon officer with a giant illuminated gun who tells me that I must place my wrist under the scanner in order to be checked and allowed entry. My photo is taken for 'security reasons', and I am told to be safe and watch my head when travelling through time. Ominous to say the least. 

The set itself is bonkers. Made entirely of scavenged materials (the majority of which is wooden pallets), the curators of this awesome place have created Nikola Teslas dream world, complete with a Tesla tower, Tesla coils, a ray gun and a time machine. Moving between times is smooth as long as you have your time travel multi-pass (Fifth Element reference), which have to be carried at all times to ensure safe passage. First we go back to the wild west; an abandoned saloon where steam powered technology has taken over - a place full of weird and wonderful inventions, giant cogs and steam trains. I clock rickety looking stairs leading up into the Tesla Tower itself, where at the top we are assured that the fastest way to travel is via zip wire; a piece of rope is thrown round me and I jump into the abyss. Safely back into the time machine and we are in Teslas Lab, the Super Advanced Energy Reactor creating a platform for DJ's who play for those time travellers who want to dance; the remainder of the room exploring inventions from the future - a massage chair and a rather large ball pit. Across the room is a tea making station and a secret door disguised as a fridge; a corridor to another realm of UV lights, cinema and curiosities. Suddenly I am dragged back through time and out into the courtyard, where a giant robot is breathing fire from its fingers and a man in a lab coat is typing on a type writer that controls fire spurting from above. Next to this bizarre scene is a shooting alley, a ray gun firing nos canisters at tin cans at the push of a button. My adventures in time travel have only just begun and already it is impossible to imagine a world outside of this world. 

LINK TO WALK THROUGH VIDEO: PFP

The Wild Wild West meets the Steam Powered Revolution

The typewriter that controls fire

Get your tokens for time travel

The fridge to another time

In a secret room was a cinema
showing back to the future

The neon lights had been stapled to the waistcoat and swirled out of the Tardis; the ultimate time travelling machine. The amount of costumes that had neon lights or other illuminative electrics in was overwhelming, clearly light is one of the crossovers between the past and the present

The light belt - a futuristic invention where the wearer is able to have light wherever he/she goes

An impossible to ride bicycle

Shooting canisters out of the ray gun

Graham - Having taken the Fifth Element theme a bit too seriously, he came as Korben Dallas complete with his taxi that had operational lights and brake lights. Made out of cardboard and old bike wheels. 

The full costume

The time-machine - the only way to get between worlds

The Zipwire - by far the fastest way to time travel.

TESLA COSTUME

As my time management has not been strong the past couple of weeks (I have had a lot of work commitments), realistically I doubt I will be able to make the costume that I envision in my head. Instead I am going to focus on just the hat and the coat, as I feel these two items are an essential part of the costume and will be easy to make in the two weeks I have left to complete this project. In a way I am excited for this event to be over, I feel I have lost momentum with the project in terms of research and I am looking forward to moving on to more abstract costumes and ways of working. 

I constantly come back to repurposing found things within my work. I have sourced a top hat and an old costume tails coat that I intend to rework and reshape. I think I am drawn to finding things and reworking them partially because there is something quite infantile and childlike about making in this way and partially because of the growing demise of our environment recycling is very important to me. If I can reuse anything in anyway I will. 

THE HAT

 In keeping with the Neo-Victorian vibe of steampunk fashion I knew I wanted a tails coat and a top hat with a plasma ball on top. I was deliberating with the idea of embedding the plasma ball into the hat so that just the orb was sticking out or simply sticking it on top. After speaking to the 3D technicians we decided it would be far simpler and more practical to glue the ball on to the top of the hat using super strong epoxy resin glue that is designed for holding glass and metals together (it will never move once its set!) . The plasma ball itself had to be battery operated as no mains electricity would be running to my head during the course of the event. The convenient thing about this particular plasma ball - apart from its little size so it wont overbalance the hat and fall off - is that you can recharge the batteries inside using a USB port charger. This means that I can glue the entire base of the ball onto the hat without having to worry about how I will get it off to change the batteries. What I didn't want was for the hat to sink when weight was put on top, so I reinforced the top with a thin piece of MDF (3mm I think) and the epoxy resin glue to keep the integral structure of the hat.

What is also cool about this plasma ball is that it reacts to sound if you are close enough to a speaker. The 'plasma' actually moves in time to the music!!! I hope that this happens whilst at the event as there will be bands playing. Although I think I will have to get really really close to the speaker and there may be too much background noise for it to work. 

After attaching the plasma ball to the hat I realised that it was going to need something else as it looked very boring with just the black base. Around this time I spoke to fellow student Maisie who gave me more ideas about what steampunk fashion actually entailed. Gears and cogs like the inside of clocks or steam engines are a frequent addition to most steampunk garments and are very stereotypical of the aesthetic. Whilst you can buy a magnitude of these cogs for very cheap off amazon I wanted as much as possible to be handmade. I began with researching steampunk gears as I believe they are different to the ones we see today that are more functional. 

I started out cutting different types of these cogs using balsa wood, but soon found that because of the grain of the wood it was difficult to get the curved edges and detail I wanted and a lot of them ended up snapping. I then moved on to thin grey card which was easier to get detail but harder to cut with the knife as it ended up going a bit 'fluffy' because not all the layers of the card had been cut. Finally I used paper plates (just because I had some handy) and these worked really well as the reinforced paper was easy to manipulate so I could get lots of the details of the gears. Once I had enough to cover the base of the plasma ball I spray painted them bronze so that they looked more metal-like. I had wanted to use Rub and Buff - a substance Maisie told me about that makes materials look like rusted metal - but I couldn't find it anywhere in Norwich and I am not a fan of buying things online unless I really have to. Whilst this is probably not a good way to source materials I know I prefer working with materials and processes that I have actually been able to see and pick up. You can never fully trust what you get online! If I had had more time I probably would have ordered some Rub and Buff as I think the metallic effect would have worked better and added to the detail of the hat. What I liked about using different materials for the gears though is that when they were spray painted they have different surfaces. The grey card absorbed the paint to have a matt effect yet the paper plates remained shiny. 

Balsa Wood and Grey Card

I think the goggles (which I had already) help to bring the aesthetic together. If I had more time I would add more cogs and gears to almost overwhelm the plasma ball, however it is difficult to completely cover the base as I had to leave space for the USB to plug in. 

THE COAT 

 I found this coat in a charity shop for £6!!!??? I am assuming its previous use was for a ringmaster costume or something similar as the quality of the material is not that good. However, it was perfect for what I needed! The steampunk costumes I have been looking at have always been dark colours, and even the cybergoth costumes only have little bits of neon colour, so I knew I wanted to cover the coat in some way. I had an old black suede fringe jacket that I never wore and decided that covering the tails coat in this suede fabric would be interesting and would give it a misshapen look as well as a more interesting texture. 

As the costume develops I have begun thinking about what I will wear underneath the coat. I want the overall aesthetic of the 'character' I am creating to look as though they have been caught between worlds because of their extensive time travelling. I think by stitching fabric onto the tails coat instead of creating a pattern and making my own coat will adhere to the 'inventiveness' of steampunk ideas and also help to make it look like my jacket got caught in the cross between times - it got destroyed so I have had to stitch it back together. This is also why I chose to use cream thread instead of black thread to stitch on the suede, although in hindsight black thread probably would have looked better and had the same effect. 

Painting with UV paint 

Because essentially I have been stitching two completely different jackets together, they didn't match up completely, leaving gaps where the red of the tails coat could be seen. I also realised that I may not have enough black material to cover the entirety of the tails coat. I went fabric shopping and found some purple metallic fabric - which reminded me of Zorg's costumes in The Fifth Element (Which I watched for research recently) - and decided that the tails and the arms would be this fabric instead of the suede. The two fabrics contrast quite nicely and add to the past meets future aesthetic. 

I have been thinking over the week about how I could incorporate a futuristic aspect into the coat; as the tails and the black represent the past, I feel I need to add a futuristic element in order to make it look like it had been to the future and back. Lights are a very important part of technology and in our current age all sorts of lights are easily accessible. I had originally thought about the idea of using LED strip lights but again I would have to order these online and due to the time restrictions I did not want to risk them coming and not working. So instead I experimented with UV paint. 

Looking back the UV paint was just as much of a risk as buying the LEDs as I don't actually own any blacklight to test whether the paint will actually work. I pictured a blue stripe around the jacket - sort of 'Tron' style - and I painted over the stitching with blue UV paint. The paint was messy and created an uneven and unclean line which was not what I was going for; plus there was the uncertainty as to whether it would even work. 

Tron: Legacy Movie picture

 That was when I found 'make your own neon effect sign'! 3m of very blue very neon lighting all battery operated and easily manipulated as it didn't come pre-wired. Because of the big stitching on the jacket I was easily able to loop the neon through the stitching all the way round the collar of the jacket and back down again make it light up all the way around. Had I had more time and found this neon sign kit earlier I would have only used neon tubing in the jacket instead of the UV as it is much more effective and less of a risk. 

Overall I think I ran out of time on the jacket, I needed to have it done by today (18th) as I have work commitments tomorrow and then the event is on Saturday, but again this is due to my poor time management and also my waining interest in the project because I am keen to start something new. 

If I started this earlier there would have been more time for experimentation and I think I would have been more pleased with the outcome, however in a way I have been continuing to think through my making and learning as I go, which is a process I always enjoy. 

In my original drawing I had a harness type belt. I picture it being black leather originally but then adding lights to make it compliment the plasma ball and to add another light up layer to the costume. I have definitely run out of time for this but perhaps it is something I will continue to explore after the event. Underneath the jacket I need layers because it is going to be cold so I am thinking of wearing a neon dress with the belt and a black mesh top underneath. The suede on the jacket should give me some extra warmth too as it has definitely weighted the fabric. 

My hope for the event is that people interact with the plasma ball. If I can get the audience to engage with the costume then I feel I will have succeeded.