The blog of an art student

From the work Laura Yule showed us in the lecture I seen that a lot of her work uses specific materials like, pebbles, electrical appliances and manikins. There also seems to be an occurring theme with Laura's work which is the idea of how we are becoming too dependent on electrical appliances and social media.  The first project Laura spoke about was her on going work with pebble dashing. Firstly focusing on our dependence on everyday electronic devices, she showed an installation of appliances she found and managed to get for free at junk yards such as a Samsung television and fridges that she then pebble dashed almost freezing these appliances. Laura thought about how we use these appliances in how she positioned them. From this project Yule made a bigger series using the same techniques and thoughts. This time she made commercial homes, using manikins, furniture and once again electronic devices. When installing these pieces she really focused on how commercial homes are set o...

Much of Rosa Johan Uddoh's work is inspired by hers and others experiences of being black. Often she uses her own body in her work whether this being as a tool, in a performance or as inspiration for her own work.  T he first piece Rosa spoke about was 'Belly of the world' where she made ceramic dinnerware by pressing clay against different parts of her body. Once Rosa finished making these ceramics she hosted a dinner party for her family and friends where she served the food in these ceramics. She mentioned how she was interested in making these objects that had her human presence.  Another one of Rosa's works was a performance piece where she sat and had a hairdresser blow dry her hair straight. When performing this piece she had a microphone that recorded what Rosa could here, which was mainly just the hair dryer and then she amplified this sound to the audience, immersing them in her individual experience. This piece was playing on the idea that black women shou...

Chris Alton was a lecturer I found really interesting throughout his practice and how he spoke about his work. The first piece Chris spoke about was his project against the English Defence League stemming from his involvement in Anti-far (an anti-fascists organisation). In response to the raise of the English Defence League Chris created the English Disco Lovers, making a positive version of this group with the same acronym. The slogan for this organisation was 'Unas Mundas, Una Gens, Unus Disco' which was Latin for one earth, one race, one disco, almost making a joke out of the English Defence League and their own slogan, highlighting his disagreement with the group. When creating the English Disco Lovers Alton's aim was to make his group more popular then the English Defence League, to do this he began making memes spreading the English Disco Lovers across social media and made advertisement such as posters and...

The first exhibit we looked at on our guided tour around the Bluecoat Gallery was 'Studio Me' by Blue Room an inclusive arts programme where artists meet weekly at the gallery to create work. 'Studio Me' showed work from two artists Joshua Henderson and Veronica Watson.   Joshua is a Liverpool based artist and this comes into his practise often as he finds interest in architecture and the sights he has seen around the city. His exhibit featured paintings on cardboard of Liverpool land marks. Whereas Veronica's work featured a series of pencil drawn portraits. Watson is a self-advocate, speaking out about the rights for those with learning disabities which has a huge impact on her work, including this exhibit as she drew portraits of the people she seen over a certain period of time.   The gallery also had an installation piece by Jade Montserrat, who we had a lecture with a couple of weeks before. It was actually really interesting seeing Jades work in person...

Morten Norbye Halvorsen practice revolves around sound art as he experiments with ways of listening to sound and recording sound. A lot of Mortens sound recordings involve overlapping and synchronising different  sound recordings. For instance the first piece he spoke about was a recording he made everyday for a week in a public room where performance pieces would take place, On the first day of the week Morten recorded the performance pieces occurring in the public room the next day he played the recording from the day before whilst also recording the events of the public room that day and the next day was the same, this occurred for an entire week. By the end of the week there was an overlapping of all these recordings. Morten has made similar works to this such as his sound recording that started with a lot of familiar relaxing sounds such as waves on a beach and then suddenly these relaxing sound where overtook by dramatic noises that weren't as recognisable such as strong...

  Iacopo Seri was such a good lecturer, even when he literally spoke gibberish the whole time.  The lecture consisted of Iacopo drawing shapes and symbols that where being projected so we could see and for each shape he drew he made a noise that kind of resembled the shape, Seri encouraged the audience to make these noises with him trying to explain everything in some kind of gibberish. After some time we did, it was weird how we understood what he wanted us to do and made all these crazy noises to go with his drawings. Iacopo also drew noises and ideas from the audience, such as one of the students (Beth) sneezing, which is now one of the most iconic sneezes in the history of Fine Art. After the lecture I went to Iacopo's Q+A to find out what the hell was going on in that lecture. At the Q+A I found out that Seri was completely free styling his actions and this lecture was a new experiment he had never done before. The only part of the experiment he had prepared for was h...

For one of our art history lectures we went to the Walker Art Gallery.  The first and probably our lecturers favourite painting was 'Dante's Dream of the Death of Beatrice' by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The painting Dante's Dream is based of the poem 'La Vita Nuova' by Dante Alighieri who has inspired many of Dante's paintings and in fact Rossetti changed his name to Dante after this poet.  The poem shows a women Beatrice as the object of Dante's unfulfilled love and she is lying on her death bed whilst an angel holding Dante's hand kissed Beatrice, showing how Dante can't touch Beatrice during her last breath due his secret love for this young girl.  The painting shows Beatrice as a red headed women wearing a white dress, the red hair shows that she was fiery and passionate, She's seen as a seductionist due to how men like Dante are drawn to her, however the white dress symbolises her innocence and purity. Beatrice's figure i...

During the lecture I found myself really struggling to focus on what Jade was saying which was annoying because I really liked Jade's Work but in the lecture she presented a silent video in the background whilst she spoke from a sheet, which made me find it really hard to listen to her and properly focus, but I did try my best and learnt a lot about Jades inspirations and reasons for her work.  Jades work focuses on sexuality, race and intelligence, talking about black history, African-American experiences, performances of how whiteness dehumanises black stories and the structure of society. Many of Jades art features charcoal writings on gallery walls and the process of this piece itself is a performance piece that she does naked and records. Jade works with charcoal as its sustainable as well as the fact that even after being cleaned of it leaves a trace on the white wall and during the performance piece Jade performs naked to show the contrast of her blackness against the whit...

Joseph Noonan-Ganley tends to make art over long periods of time, focusing and following people who tend to have died.  Just one of Josephs projects was fem-fabrications where he followed Joseph Cornell who is  an artist who passed away in 1972. Noonan-Ganley's research lasted for a long period of time consisting of him reading books by and about Cornell, visiting archives that held information about him and watching videos and interviews featuring Cornell. In his research Joseph mainly focused on Cornell's sexuality and sex life, how he experienced difficulties with women and the way he spoke and wrote about women.  Furthering from his research Joseph began visiting Cornell's home and places that he would go often like the neighbourhood he lived in and worked in. In this process Noonan-Ganley videoed himself walking the streets toward Cornell's home whilst reading out parts of Cornell's writings about his relationships with wom...

Well, Heath Bunting was an interesting character, it's not very often you meet an artist who was once homeless and has also been classified as a terrorist.  Heaths practice often revolves around political art and his process and actions are just as important as the physical piece he would present.  For a short time Heath was actually homeless which was when he began working with bits of broken glass, which lead him to being took on as an apprentice making stained glass. Later he went back to doing street art and used these new skills to his liking. Making stained glass graffiti out of windows in abandoned homes, which did result in a running in with the police, causing the end to this project.  Later Heath started using more internet based work. Such as his chalk project where he and another artist made a website link that would cause a viewer to go to a survey they made. They wrote ...