THE PARROT

I am basing my spectacle on the Scarlet Macaw parrot, which is arguably the most recognisable parrot. Most parrot costumes I have seen are clearly based on this particular breed of parrot, which is most noticeable because of its bright red, yellow and blue colours. My more successful spectacles are more curvaceous in their pattern (the shrimp/domesticated spectacle), and a curved or wobbly edge would resemble the wings and feathers of a parrot. The basic form will be a poncho, with the uppermost ‘wing’ stitched shut so I can put my hands in and flap without people seeing my hands. The addition of a hood means that, like all my spectacles, my senses will be obscured, but I have the option to easily move around if I choose too. I only want to suggest a parrot, so I am not worried about it being particularly true to real life. In all my drawings, the beak covers the entire face and I want to stay as true to my drawings as possible. The fact that I am making the beak this large and sticking to 3 colours, highlights the fact that I am exaggerating its main features, and not staying true to a typical parrot.

The stitching on this spectacle - particularly on the hood - is not the neatest, as my sewing machine kept pulling and it took me a long time to figure out why. At first I was frustrated as I thought that because you could se some of the yellow underneath the sequin it would ruin the spectacle, but I realised that it is not the details that people will notice it is the spectacle as a whole. When I feel like this about a piece of work it is good to remember Fischli and Weiss's work, who are quite amateur in their processes, which is a strength as it keeps the work playful. For the beak, I am using expanding foam in a cardboard mould, as it is lightweight and I will be able to wear it for long periods of time on my face without it suffocating me or weighing me down. The foam is also easy to shape as it can be sawn and sanded if the foam overflows out of the mould. I had thought about painting it a bright yellow and making it really bold, similar to the rest of the piece, but I think the beak needs to be 'normal' coloured, in order to keep the resemblance of a the macaw. The ridiculousness of this spectacle will come from the exaggeration of the colour and size of the beak. Before I painted I did a thin layer of paper mache, so that the paint would not soak into the foam. When I painted it some of the paper started peeling and flapping but as with the trees, the fact that my processes and construction are visible only adds to the spectacle. 

CAREER PACK - Festival Summer Work

It is very difficult as I learnt from my research from the last unit to get your artwork - specifally costume based artwork into festivals, as there is a thorough application process and you are competeing against already established costume and performance businesses. Therefore, in order to still be involved in the festival scene and keep my foot in the door, I am working as many festivals as I can this year; working on the bars and on a pizza food stall. This means that I can still show my work at lots of different festivals by wearing them myself around the festival site, and I can still network with established traders and performers in the scene in order to possibly get more work.

I am going to Hogsozzle festival at the end of may as a puppeteer with Animus Puppetry, Jodie Smith's puppet company. Originally I was to be more involved with the making of the puppets but as I am working on my spectacles for the degree show I haven't been able to be as involved as I would have liked. This will change after graduation when I have more time but for the time being I will just be a puppeteer.

The first festival of the year for me is the Maui Waui Pirate Ball, where I am planning to take one of my degree show pieces to document it in its intended environment. I am then working with Firewater Events, a company I worked with last summer, to work the bar at several festivals this summer including Flatlands, Maui Waui, Illusive and Equinox. I will also be working at Wood Fired Pizza on their stall, selling pizzas, coffee and donuts at many smaller festivals this summer too. Whilst I know that these are not positions within the arts scene, they are paid positions and will offer a chance for me to network with people who have been in the scene for years. Ultimately with festivals its all about who you know as well as what you know. After graduation I also plan to keep developing different costumes for different events, not just for myself but for others too.

The third and final spectacle

I asked Carl a while ago if I could make my own graduation gown and cap, which he said wouldnt be a problem as long as I got permission from the Vice Chancellor. After talking with Sarah, she said why didn't I use the graduation gown for the third piece for my degree show. Initially I loved this idea, as i could just take it out of the show on the day of graduation and wear it.
When I started trying to draw out ideas, I found it so hard to come up with something that functioned as a gown that was also its own spectacle. Everything was too functional and too practical. Just like the lantern, I was too focused on making something that looked like a gown. I was also struggling with this concept because I realised I wanted to have that sense of unity and togetherness at graduation with my fellow classmates with all of us wearing the same celebratory gown.

So, once again, back to the drawing board.

My work is all made with a festival concept in mind, so why not make a spectacle for a specific festival? I know that the work I made for the Tesla event earlier in the year was not all it couldve been, and I feel this is my chance to build on this and create a stand alone spectacle that will also fit in at a themed event. The Maui Waui Into the Woods Pirate Ball is on the 11th may - A week before hand in and 2 days before the degree show is set up. This is the perfect opportunity to show my work in the context it was designed for, which is ultimately what this units work has been leading up too. The Pirate Ball is obviously pirate themed, and most people go as pirates, but this theme extends to anything and everything pirate related. I thought about making an octopus or a kraken to wear, or a mermaid, but I thought all of these are too figurative. I wanted something I could make very abstract and that has a lot of colour.

So I decided to make a Parrot. I wanted to build upon the shrimp spectacle and also the netted spectacle I made that Devil Child wore in Drag in the Gallery, by combining the shape of the shrimp with additional netting that would be stitched on instead of threaded through mesh. By making a spectacle that loosely represents a parrot it allows me to have bright, vibrant colours and textures which are so fundamental in my work. The spectacle can just suggest a parrot through colour and I don't have to have feathers or the form of a parrot, which makes it a perfect subject to explore in a abstract way. Hopefully this means that the finished spectacle will fulfil my needs as an artist by being alien and other worldly but will also fulfil the needs of the festival in being pirate related.

Plans for Degree Show!!

I now know what I picture for the show. I have been struggling to picture how everything will come together visually, as I am used to looking at each spectacle individually. However it will be impossible to see how they will all look together until I have made them all.

After the short film I made I decided I didn't want to waste time learning how to film better and edit better when I should be focusing on what I am good at which is creating spectacles from fabrics. So, for the degree show, the plan is to create a static snapshot of a festival scene with my three spectacles in the middle positioned in a 'huddle'. In order to to create a festival aesthetic I think there needs to be nature surrounding the spectacles. So I envision there to be trees behind them, or either side of them. I think if these trees were normal trees, then the other worldly aesthetic wouldn't come through, so these trees wont be typical trees. Perhaps they will be more like the trees from a Dr. Seuss film.

I have considered that this means by work for the degree show will be static, unless I allow the audience to take them off there stands and wear them. My spectacles are designed to be worn and moved around in, and I worry that the audience will not understand my work fully unless they are allowed to wear them during the exhibition.  Most of the movement of the spectacles will be documented and submitted as supporting evidence, which is why I am still debating whether the assessors seeing the full movement of the spectacles is enough for me, or whether I want the audience too to see the spectacles live up to their full potential.

The Lantern so far

I started this spectacle as a response to the street lights I saw in Chinatown in San Francisco. I loved how decorative they were despite the fact that this had nothing to do with the function of the light.

I initially wanted the piece to have a basic hexagon frame to hold a base structure that would sit on the shoulders, and then have a very oversized 'hat' that would act as the point of the lantern and would be detached from the main body of the piece. The technicians in the 3D room said that thin steel would work, but I would have to learn how to weld. Whilst I want to learn how to weld and steel would be the more finished option, I wanted to see if it would work first before I tried this. So I bought sticks of bamboo and cut them to the same size as the panels I had made. I then tried to thread wire through them but as it turns out the bamboo was not grown enough to be hollow all the way through. Back to the drawing board. I then decided to just gaffa tape the wire to the sticks of bamboo to create a sort of tent pole like rod that could be threaded through the top of the lantern and so the material would hang off it. Wire could then be threaded across the hexagon so it would sit on the shoulders of the wearer. As it hung on my hat stand all pinned in shape I realised the white panels were too wide, and it would look better if they were stitched so that the blue panels were together and the white silk was sticking out. This looked better because it gave the spectacle more depth and texture and the possibility to add more boning to hold the shape would be there.

I then made the top - or the hat - of the spectacle. As in my original drawing, I wanted flaps to represent tiles and I wanted lots of different textures of the colour green to mimic the original lanterns that I saw in San Francisco. Willow has more flexibility than bamboo, so I used willow to thread through the edges of the shape that through to make it hold its form. When I put it all together on a person (they were holding it up),  my first thought was that it didn't work at all. I hated it because it wasn't oversized enough, as I had pictured a big floppy top to the lantern.

This was a pivotal moment for me. I realised that I had been so focused on making the spectacle look like a lantern that I realised that more often than not my works start off as something and then develop into something else entirely. I think this is because the original drawing I did for the lantern was more decorative and figurative and not very abstracted, which meant that whatever I made from the drawing was also going to more realistic. As soon as I took out the willow and put in on the head looking like this - all floppy - I knew that that was how it was supposed to be. Having it flopped down like this is more other worldly as it is difficult to know exactly what it is. Seeing how much better the top part of the spectacle worked without the willow through it I knew that I needed to also change the bottom half as that to was too structured. So I decided to take a risk and cut the bottom half apart completely, in order to construct it the same was as I made the top - in four triangles to form a pyramid type shape which would sit on the shoulders. This spectacle has been difficult to make, and I think that is because I have been working from such a figurative drawing which left little room for experimental interpretation. However seeing it on the body like this (see below), it is much closer to how I pictured it in my mind.

I always imagined it with bells on each corner - not large ones so that they are particularly noticeable but so that there is sound when there is movement. Bells have a lot of symbolic meanings - from religious connotations to the association with the mind and the expansion of consciousness. Bells are rung to mark the time, and are intended to be heard from a distance. I like the idea that you can hear the spectacle before you even see it. To me this also relates to festivals, where often you hear the music and the sound of the culture before you see it, and when you eventually do see it, it is a moment of pure beauty. There are many other reasons why I wanted to incorporate bells. They announce an arrival - like a door bell - but they also are rung for the beginning or ending of something - at weddings or at a funeral. The degree show is the culmination of three years of uni, it is the ending of a massive chapter of my life, but this is also the beginning of a brand new chapter where hopefully I can carry on the ideas that I have only the scraped on this last year of uni. In china, bells are a way to connect with the spirits, so I cannot help but feel that it is appropriate to use them on a spectacle that is not only based on a Chinese lantern but a spectacle that is trying to channel an other worldly feel.

I am still not 100% happy with this spectacle, this could be because it is a very different spectacle to what I have created previously, in that it is more decorative and is made from a material with a pre-existing pattern on it, and I wonder whether I will reach a point with it where I decide it is just time to stop working on it completely and scrap it.

Life in Colour - Nunns Yard - 23rd/24th March 2019

Saskia asked me at the beginning of the unit whether I would be interested in her exhibition that she was curating at Nunns Yard in Norwich - which would include work responding to colour. She was interested in having my work in the show because of its relation to festivals, circus and colourful shapes and forms. She was up for showing work I had already created, but I knew that to keep my work pushing forward I wanted to make something new.

I was so happy with the way the yellow piece turned out for the 'Wall to Wall' exhibition that I decided to use it for Life in Colour. As I have already played around with displaying it and documenting it in different ways I knew I needed to use this exhibition as a test for the degree show. As I did not have much input into the curation of the show - that was all Saskia - I knew I just needed to focus on different ways of displaying. I couldn't hang anything in Nunns Yard because it is a listed building, so the initial plan was to make a stand to go inside the spectacle to hold it up and hold its shape. Between San Francisco, 'What you on?', and my job commitments I had less time than I thought to make the stand for the 'Domesticated Spectacle', so the idea to use my hat stand was a spontaneous decision. In the end it actually worked well having the hat stand as a way of hanging the work, as it added to the domestic qualities of the piece. Hat stands are used for clothing and people know that you take things off a hat stand to wear them in an everyday environment. This means that the expectation that the spectacle is a wearable piece is there for the audience, which was important to me. However, because the hat stand is on show, it makes the piece more sculptural, so the invitation to wear the piece is questioned, as the audience are not sure whether they are allowed to move it or not. Ultimately, the wearing of the piece by the audience is not as important to me at this stage in my practice because I am focusing on the spectacles themselves, so I was not thinking about whether or not I should have put more effort into advising the audience that the piece was indeed wearable. 

When installing, I had brought along the initial drawing for the spectacle that I did in response to the painting in 'Wall to Wall', as well as the final image of my work in front of the original painting in hope that I could display them alongside the spectacle to show the development of the piece. As I had to go to work (the timing of the exhibition really clashed with my work commitments), I asked Saskia to make a decision about whether or not it worked to show them alongside my piece. As curator, I knew that she gets the final say in what is shown. In the end the images were not shown alongside the spectacle, as I think that was the right decision, as it meant that the spectacle became more ambiguous as to its purpose and function as an artwork. 

My piece was shown next to a large silver foil sculpture on the back wall, and I really liked the contrast between the colours and textures. Because of the colour, the whole exhibition was playful and fun, which meant that the playful element to my spectacle was enhanced. Even though my work is made with a festival context in mind and I do not ever picture it within a gallery setting, I know that it will be for the degree show, and this exhibition has been valuable in knowing how I want to display my spectacles. I know I want to make 3 spectacles, and I think if they are just standing alone like the 'Domesticated Spectacle' was in this show, but in a group, it will look good, but I think I want to get the festival context to show through.

CAREER PACK - Moosey Art presents 'What you on?' by Dan David 20/3/19-22/3/19

Working with Moosey art I had the opportunity to go down to Shoreditch in London to help out with master stone carver Dan David's first solo show. Norwich based stone carver Dan David is inspired by the diverse culture that was the 90s rave scene and all its associated paraphanalia, his most famous works being his large limestone ecstasy tablets. Before arriving, all I knew about the exhibition was that they planned to recreate a rave within a gallery environment which would act as a visual jump back in time to the raves of the era. I knew that my role would just be helping out with anything that the team might need and distributing leaflets around Shoreditch and the brick lane area. As I know one of the leading members of the Moosey team, I was able to get funding for my travel and my accommodation whilst down there. 

The building for the show was an old car dealership which had white walls, low concrete ceilings and exposed wiring. It had the main room where the main 'rave' would be and a smaller side room, which would be the main gallery space. All of these features reflected the the guerrilla nature of illegal events and helped to emphasise the rave aesthetic. Upon arrival my first job was helping tape up black fabric and neon rave posters on all the walls of the larger space (posters by @fauxflyers). The black fabric alongside the neon was a stark contrast from the white walls of the gallery space. The authentic appearance of the event was enhanced by a DJ blasting out acid house, crushed water bottles and conspicuous baggies littering the floor and a neon lazer spelling out 'What you on?' on the opposite wall. There was even a van parked in the corner looking like it had just pulled up. This authentic appearance increased during the night as the audience came and went, leaving their water bottles and empty cans and bottles in piles around the pillars and around the edge of the room - which is just how it happens at real raves. Not only were the audience grouped in conversation in and around the main gallery space, people broke off to become unified with the rig and have a proper dance. 

In the gallery space, the main attraction of the event was the stack of 300 stone pills in the centre of the room. These were the most affordable artworks in the collection at £100 each, and the audience were encouraged to sift through the pills to find the right one. This hands on approach in a gallery environment was refreshing, and was one of the most dynamic parts of the exhibition as it broke down the barriers between audience and artwork, showing that artworks dont always have to be sacred and untouchable. Everyone staffing the show was given a 'What you on?' t-shirt produced by streetwear Weekend Offender, which made them easy to spot should visitors have an enquiry about an artwork. One of my jobs was getting people's pills from the centre packaged and then pointing them in the direction of Frazer, who was in charge of the event, for payment. Because of the unconventional nature of the exhibit (the centre pills), it required at least 3 team members to be on hand at all times to supervise. The variety of the designs meant that audience members often chose multiple pills to purchase, often coming back several times to pick out new designs for their own collections. I didn't expect to have such an important role during the private view of the exhibition, but I feel I managed to successfully answer questions and enquiry's with confidence because of a briefing beforehand. Coupled with the dynamic rave room, this piece kept the audiences entertained throughout the evening, and the spaces ultimately became more lively as the night went on. 

Working with Moosey to help install and run a real, professional exhibition that incorporated something that I have reasearched and love (90s rave culture) was an invaluable experience and allowed me to network not just within the Norwich street art scene but also within the London scene too. Frazer has already said that he would be willing for me to help out with future exhibitions also. The show also inspired my own practice - if it is possible to create a rave environment without actually having a rave, is it possible to recreate a festival environment without actually having a festival? 

London street art was also inspiring for my drawings.... 

Artist Statement

Taking inspiration from festival costume and culture my work is versatile and can adapt to many different situations and contexts which I have explored throughout my practice. Whilst they are designed and made to be worn within the festival scene, my ‘Spectacles’ can stand alone in their own right as performers, however, take them out of the gallery space and they will reach their full potential as otherworldly and alien pieces of craft. Being within the fantastical world of festival culture will transform them by amplifying their personalities and will heighten the air of spontaneity. With spectacle there is no distinction between performer and audience, and with my own work I hope to encourage audience interaction in a playful and humorous way.

Insta: yourlocaldud

Taking inspiration from festival costume and culture her work is versatile and can adapt to many different situations and contexts which she has explored throughout her practice. Whilst they are designed and made to be worn within the festival scene, her ‘Spectacles’ can stand alone in their own right as performers, however, take them out of the gallery space and they will reach their full potential as otherworldly and alien pieces of craft. Being within the fantastical world of festival culture will transform them by amplifying their personalities and will heighten the air of spontaneity. With spectacle there is no distinction between performer and audience, and with her work she hopes to encourage audience interaction in a playful and humorous way.

Insta: yourlocaldud