BA Artist: Designer Maker
Here are photos of my final pieces in the gallery space. I’m happy with how they look in the space.
My space efficient planter. The final outcome I came up with was very different to what I planned. I am glad that I turned out ok in the end because I was really uncertain as to what I was doing with it. The design works and it also drains itself so that the plants don’t flood.
I have decided that for my final piece I wanted to make some fish using wire, masking tape and tissue paper. My hope was that I could make more expressive and interesting models this way.
My idea was that I could display a couple of models on plinth in front of my drawings.
I started by making a prototype to test out my method as I wasn’t sure how it would work to glue tissue paper to masking tape.
I did this by making an eel based off of one of my drawings.
Once I had done that, I decided to make an octopus which was meant to show how octopus are consumed in quite a cruel way in Japan. The octopus are killed in quite a nasty way because they are believed to taste better soon after they have died. The thing was that there is a problem with disposable chopsticks and so I thought I could make an octopus and put chopsticks in it.
Above is the process of making my octopus. I decided not to continue it because I didn’t think it fit in the well so I wanted to just do the fish.
These are some more drawings that I have done.
I have found doing these very beneficial because I have now decided what I was like to exhibit.
‘Stringfoot’ refers to a condition suffered by urban pigeons. It is when string, thread, human hair and other such things get tangled up with pigeon’s feet and causes them to lose their toes.
It’s a really nasty and tragic thing and there are people out there helping some of these birds recover and apparently when rescued from the thing binding their feet, they survive remarkably well, so there is hope.
The reason I bring this up when I am doing something about sea creatures rather than avians, is because it made me think about fishing lines and fishing nets. And whilst I haven’t heard stories about ‘stringfoot’ happening to sea creatures, it did make me think about how fish get tangled and caught up in nets and fishing lines. I think it could make for a horrible but hopefully meaningful image to try and highlight this problem in my drawings.
When I was watching YouTube one day, as really interesting video came up in my recommended tab and so I decided to have a look at it.
The video was all about the reason why we don’t see great white sharks in aquariums, but perhaps more interesting was that it talked about the attempts that people have made to keep great whites in captivity.
I linked the video if you wanted to look at it, but long story short the reason they don’t do well is mostly because they are long range predators that must keep moving in long uninterrupted lines to thrive. Aquariums can’t really accommodate this and that’s why a lot of great whites that have been in captivity have died in the aquarium or died shortly after release. The most recent attempt was in Okinawa, Japan where the full grown shark was found dead in only three days. It seems that there has been more success in keeping younger, smaller great whites than the full grown adults but like I said, they tended to die shortly after release into the wild.
One of the things that I really latched onto was the way that these sharks were injuring themselves because they were being kept in an unsuitable environment. It made me kind of upset because it was something that kept happening every single time although I was most upset by the example about the shark in Japan. Whilst they hadn’t set out to catch the shark, instead getting it from a fisherman who accidentally caught it, but it was an 11 foot shark. I just felt like it was kind of irresponsible to do that.
On the back of this, I would like to start drawing some sharks that have ended up injured. I thought it could make for a good concept to show that we really can affect even the most feared of sea predators.
I don’t think that I could be doing a project involving designing creatures without mentioning my undying love for the Pokemon franchise.
I have had this strange fascination with fantastical creatures and drawing them ever since I was a child and I really owe this in part to Pokemon.
At a superficial glance, Pokemon are just these little creatures that 10 year olds collect and battle with. And whilst I won’t deny the collecting and battling aspect, there are a lot of deeper, sometimes very dark things running in the background whether this be the in game Pokemon encyclopaedia (the Pokedex), the various creepy locations throughout the series (most notably Lavender Town which was said to be responsible for several child suicides) or strange character backstories (or sometimes the lack of). Yes, like most Nintendo games, Pokemon is no exception to being subjected to some very dark undertones whilst, on the surface, being a vibrant and wonderful land filled with adventure and friendship.
There’s a lot of Pokemon that are directly influenced by people’s existence in that world. There’s even some Pokemon that were artificially created such as Mewtwo and Porygon.
Aside from the three Pokemon listed above, there are couple of Pokemon that relate more closely to my project thematically speaking.
The first two being Trubbish and Garbodor.
I hope that by showing you these examples as to why I am so interested in them. What they show is how you can use the creatures in a game or a story to convey even more story or world building. Whilst my characters aren’t existing in the same way that the Pokemon exist in theirs, they are creatures that are being used to develop a narrative about the wider world, just like Pokemon like Muk and Ditto develop a narrative about theirs wether it be pollution or controversial genetic mutations.
