Ideas for Posters

Some rough ideas for marketing material, I've just being playing around with images from the internet, as we have decided on the title 'Lost Property.' Marketing have decided that we are going to use luggage labels for lots of the promotional material, and use old flyers painted over and stamped instead of paying for new flyers to be printed. Still playing round with a logo as we have found a picture online of a Polish Lost Property sign but I still need to re-draw/design it because at the moment the image is very small and pixelated. The fonts used were just the first ones that I clicked on, but we were thinking about using one from dafont.com which Jonny found and works really well. Also I haven't put all the details that we want, times, place etc as these are just rough trials.

Feedback for our show

When I was at the gallery in Leeds University I noticed that they had a wall where people could post their comments about the exhibition. This has become a really common thing for galleries to do to try and work out what the public likes, and how to resolve any problems there may be. I found the most interesting wall of feedback I have seen was at the Turner Prize two years ago because people were so opinionated about it, there was such a huge variety of comments that it was so intriguing to read, however wouldn't have been very productive to the curators and artists. There are lots of ways to obtain feedback for an exhibition but the audience needs to feel like it is fun for them to do, or they are becoming part of the exhibition which is something we need to carefully consider.

My proposed Idea for Final Exhibition

My work at the moment is based around using various unusual painting techniques to recreate images of diseased cells, primarily cancer cells. I want to draw the audience into my work and look at the details in my pieces as this was something that I don't feel happens enough in galleries. You are always aware that there is a person sat in the corner watching your every move to ensure you don't tamper with the work or try to steal it, which often results in the viewer being wary of getting too close to the work. At the start of my project I was creating strips of paper with prints going down, changing each time the print lost some paint. The changes were very subtle as well as the intricate marks made and required the viewer to peer very closely into the paint, however when presenting my work in crits and tutorials I found that the audience stood too far away for the detail to be seen. I contemplated the idea of creating tiny pieces so that the audience would have no choice but to go right up to the work, but I decided that the work might seem very lost in a room with other larger pieces. I then thought about combining the idea of cells and microscopy.

For my final piece I want to create some microscope slides of my own either with tiny designs of my own on, or just samples of paint mixed with unusual substances to see what the structure looks like. Ideally I would like to paint the structure of a cancer cell and then somehow shrink it onto a piece of glass so that it looks like an original cancer slide. In reality I don't know how feasible this is, and may end up just using real slides bought off the internet. I also want to paint approximately 3 large paintings of my interpretation of cells to hang. Ultimately I will need a plinth with a microscope on it and a place to store the slides, and some wall space to hang my paintings. Depending on the type of microscope I can get hold of I will probably have to have a socket close by too.

More ways to display work

It's really weird how as soon as you start thinking about how a piece of work is hung, it is all you can think about! I went into the University Gallery at the Uni of Leeds and was really intrigued by the methods they had used to hang the work. It was mostly paintings of previous students in Leeds and most were hung in the same way - with a screw system attached to the back of the pieces. These were either screwed directly into the walls or then attached to a wire and suspended from the top of the board/wall. It was really interesting to see that they had used the same fixings for both types of hanging, obviously to save both money and time. These are very sturdy mechanisms for supporting the pieces as a lot of them were very old pieces in heavy ostentatious gold frames! This is also something we have to consider when we display our work as a whole - the framing of pieces. In this exhibition I did notice that because of the difference in size, style and shape, the frames the works seemed slightly mishmashed. I think framing is often unnecessary and we will need to think about what frames, if any, are suitable for all our work to ensure that there is some consistency.

I also considered the lighting in the gallery. This picture makes it seem very dark, however it was actually very well lit. The windows had been covered by a semi transparent blind so the light was still getting through but without the distractions of the outside. There were long sections in the ceiling with numerous lights side by side, some were on and some weren't depending on the works around, the direction they were pointing was also adjustable. I think this worked really well, as it can be changed for each exhibition without too much problem, and the light can be directed at the pictures in any way to suit the work. There were also some pieces that had extra lighting pointing at the work which was mounted on the wall alongside the piece. I also noticed that the descriptions of the pieces were stuck on the walls/plinths with a foam sticky square like you get on birthday cards! This meant that they were raised off the wall, or the plinth to make more of a feature and to make it more inviting to the viewer. There was one sculpture where the description was just stuck onto the plinth and this gave an unprofessional air to the work, it looked as though there had been another piece of work there previously and no one had taken the time to present it properly.

Ways to hang work

While we were in the exhibition space I was looking at the way the window display was hung. In one of the units the artist had suspended their work by getting a piece of fishwire and punching 2 wholes in the top of their work to loop the wire through. These were then attached to the ceiling by a hook. I didn't like this technique, because although at was virtually invisible from a distance, once you got close enough it looked pretty amateur. As you can see in the picture there was still a length of wire that wasn't cut off, and the work now permanently has small holes in it.

I preferred the way of hanging shown below. The artist had made the fixings more of a feature, rather than trying to make it invisible and failing like above. They had clamped small bulldog clips attached to fishing wire to their pieces and suspended them from the ceiling again. Unfortunately we could not go inside this Unit so I could not see how they were attached to the ceiling, but I would imagine it would be a similar technique again. I think the reason this way of hanging works better than the one above is because it makes a feature out of the clips, they are stylised and fit well with the work. The wire in the pieces above seems like it wasn't considered for a vast amount of time, the wire is just tied to keep it in place, the work has been defaced to hang it, and they seem to have failed in their attempt to make the fixings invisible. Weirdly the bulldog clips seem less noticeable than the fishing wire as they work with the photographs presented.

Things to consider in our exhibition space

There were lots of things about the space that we need to find a way round for the actual exhibition. The floors were horrible, there were only a few sockets around the room which led to wires trailing across the floor in a few places (which wasn't an issue at the moment as the space is not open to the public, just a window display), items such as an old fan were obviously no longer in use but still attached to the wall, a fire escape and lots of wires in one corner(which will be difficult to alter), and the lighting and ceiling seemed pretty poor. These things can easily be dealt with by a lick of paint and removing an nails, bolts etc in the walls. Problems such as the metal poles next to the window in Unit 4 are more difficult to deal with, these are issues we will have to work around rather than try to eliminate.

Site for our Exhibition

It was really interesting going to the site today. The Art in Unusual Spaces project is trying to find a use for unused shop spaces in Leeds and it is the perfect opportunity for us to take advantage of the free space. Initially I was distracted by the interior of the space, small details that would have to be rectified when we are to exhibit in there. Below are some of the pictures I took today.

Being part of the marketing team one of the main aspects we need to think about is how we are going to get people to come. What sort of advertising do we need to do to promote ourselves to the maximum. When we were looking at the space today the curator, Yvonne, was reinforcing the fact that a lot of the people who will come to our exhibition will just stumble upon it, and too many themes will be confusing and works will clash. Being in an old shop, in a still functioning shopping centre means a great deal needs to be considered to make the venue work for us. Once we have decided on a theme we can start to decide the best way to promote that, not simply handing out mountains of flyers for people to immediately throw away. I have found a website for printing, Face Media Group, who can print anything onto a huge range of products that are more interesting than a flyer, i.e. mugs, stickers, balloons, memory sticks, pens as well as tickets and invitations etc.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Peter Randall-Page

Me and Chikae went to visit Yorkshire Sculpture Park a couple of weeks ago. It was freezing cold and we were walking round in the mud - it was a really different to your usual gallery experience! I found that you really appreciated the work as the grounds were so large that you could walk around for hours seeing a piece of sculpture in the distance and try and locate it. It was really quiet when we went, only a handful of other people there so it did make the space seem a bit too big for the amount of works that were there. This was one issue that I felt let the sculpture park down, as an art venue it is not ideal as all the work seems lost in the grandeur of the grounds, it is obviously more tailored to a family day out. There were a couple of galleries within the grounds that were very interesting. One was the 'Underground gallery' underneath a large grass bunker with a long corridor with about 5 or 6 large rooms off from it. This was where they had one of the featured artist's work, Peter Randall-Page, a mixture of his sketches and tester pieces, and then some of his final huge sculptures. We noticed that in Gallery One it was noticeably darker than in the other rooms, the lighting was very soft and lit the sculptures very gently so that they did not appear to be so dominating. I found it very interesting to have a room at the end of the gallery, 'The Project Space,' where all of his sketch books, drawings, and maquettes were available to see. I really loved this as it meant that you got more of an insight into the process that the artist went through to get his final pieces. With works such as sculpture it is often difficult to guess the process behind the piece. It can be especially difficult as most metals and clays can be altered and painted so that they have any effect desired, and you are often not allowed to touch the sculpture to give you any clues about material. There was a huge difference between viewing the sculptures outside in the vast grounds, and having this intimate relationship with the piece in a relatively small room. The pieces seemed much more abstract when they were just placed in the centre of a room, like an alien life form that you could walk around and be intrigued by. When the pieces were out in the fields around you could see them from miles away, you are almost drawn towards them to try and work out what it is you can see.

Using the natural surroundings can be very difficult to do, there were a couple of pieces that we saw that just didn't seem to work such as the piece below by Paolozzi - they reminded me of 'plop art' and I felt they were really out of place in the site and didn't seem to have worked with the site itself. There was one piece that seemed like a giant umbrella, blown inside out, with various random objects stuck to the ends of the spires, that was awful. It didn't add to the surroundings, it didn't work, and it looked very out of place next to the other pieces - unfortunately I can't find a picture of it! When we set up our own exhibition this is something that each person will have to consider carefully, ideally each person should choose their site in response to their pieces, however we have to make our pieces work in the space that we have available. Prior to visiting the park I did not realise the importance of this, and thought that it would just look right once it was in a gallery setting, but now I realise that I have to think about my work in this way.


Paolozzi


There were some pieces that worked really well with the juxtaposition of their work and the grounds, such as Shaun Pickard's 'Unnatural' (below), a series of illuminated signs attatched to the trees. These pieces would have been great to see at night time, they had a photograph in the gift shop and you could really see the depth there was to the piece. Lighting is extremely important when showing your work, especially when it is a piece that involves light in the artwork itself.


Shaun Pickard

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