It's Degree Show Time Again!

Come one come all, if you're in Dundee it's free!

My work will be at the Dalhousie building as of Friday! But Assessments tomorrow so keep your fingers crossed!

Good Luck to all the Masters students! x

At the drawing table...

Designed by Monica Hughes.

"I wanted to provide 'an experience' for the senses. I have found I cannot resist touching things (particularly in Galleries!) and I am constantly being told 'don't touch!' I therefore wanted to encourage people to instinctively touch and interact with my work."

A good starting point for considering my degree show space. Unlike my undergraduate degree show I want people to touch my work. That was the biggest mistake I made with the chess sets, people wanted to play with them and I didn't want that, but the whole point was not to make static objects. This year I think I've come up with my solution.

Brainforest...

This is definitely what it would be like to be inside a designers mind!

Brainforest is an enchanting installation by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlingerbut at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Japan) from 2004. And while I think it would be my ideas way of displaying the madness that is my thought process, their explanation is far more elegant:

"In the rain forest of the brain, the bio-diversity of thoughts proliferates and the intellect's short-circuits whirr in your eyes. Needless to say, as time goes by the circuits get tired and nervours; there are burn-outs and failures. But chance creates the sparkling ideas." - G. Stiener & J. Lenzlingerbut

In third year the design school gave us two interdisciplinary projects with the other departments. Our first project was to define design - our group decided to show how our design process worked in a mess of objects and the way it condensed into coherant ideas. In the end it was a mess as this installation could have been, except it isn't. It's beautiful and elegant and says everything our project wanted, but failed to do.

(This website has more wonderful photographs of the Brainforest.)

iBirdie

Postcard design for week 7 - during our group project I kept folding up the old post-its and ones I'd scribbled notes & ideas down on and started turning them into little origami cranes.

Yes, I'm obsessed.

At work at my dad's opticians in Blair we've just taken down the window display full of cranes which my sister and I spent three days making & it is being shipped off to the practice in Broughty-Ferry because we got such a good reaction to it. Apparently lots of people have been just popping their head in the door to say how much they liked it & to find out who made them...one of the local primary schools has even asked for us to come and teach the kids how to make them during a craft day.

Anyway, because everyone was going a little iCrazy, when Grace saw them she called them 'iBird' which I've corrupted into iBirdies and iLove them and I'm hoping that the Japanese tradition that anyone who folds a thousand cranes will be granted is true. Need a bit of luck.

(re)presentation

Yesterday morning prior to my Bowler Hats with Sleeves lecture I dropped into Border looking for a birthday card for a friend. Needless to say I didn't get a card, but I did come across a cultural research probe.

Down the main stairwell of the Dundee branch of Borders there is currently a small exhibition of photographs being displayed (2nd-31st October) called '(Re)presentation' which portray's two images of seven members of the branches staff and asks the public to pick the correct tribal grouping for the staff member. I think of social groupings such as goth, girly, geek, scene, trendy, sporty etc as tribes on the basis of a Talk to Frank study on the social groupings of school children which I studied as part of my undergraduate dissertation last year. This exhibition asks a similiar question to my dissertation study on personal appearance with tag lines of 'What is self image to you?', 'image maker, image taker' and 'fake doesn't make friends' and I am really quite intreged by this social experiment. Image is so important, yet entirely subjective.

My intent is to return to the exhibition and look at it properly, plus, since Rhiannon - in the 3rd year class I work with - works there, I'm going to ask her about the exhibit and see what she knows about.

I'll try and get some sort of image to add to this post when I get along there again.

Strathearn Gallery...

Yesterday I took all my wears, my chess & draught sets and gave them to the Strathearn Gallery in Crieff, it's been forever since I went there, but it's a lovely space and this will be my first official exhibition outwith of university - scary, but good.

Strathern Gallery, Crieff, Graduates 2008

4th Oct- 8th Nov 2008