At the start of this project I was unsure as to what I wanted to look at within the Urban Landscape, I have looked at buildings and urban cityscapes in previous projects so I tried to avoid going back to either of these routes.
It took a while for inspiration to come my way and as I had booked a trip to London I thought this would be a great opportunity for gaining some new ideas. I was advised to go to certain areas of London and look at specific things which included urban areas such as graffiti, I felt uneasy about doing so as I was concerned that this would lead me to focus on a typical urban influence that many people would tend to think of.
Luckily for me I had no idea how to get to those places and ended up lost with a clear/open mind as to what I should look for, this led me to look at the parts of the urban city that people disregard everyday. Initially I photographed various signs and road markings but further into the day I started to look between buildings and down streets that are on the main strips of the city.
I decided to start working from my images by cutting out sections to see what I found interesting about them, I liked the idea of cutting things out and putting them back together and layering different/contrasting images. I felt like it was going no where fast so tried to edit my images to make them seem more appealing. This worked for a while and I attempted various mixed media drawings from them but again this lost its appeal rather quickly.So because I had no idea what to do next I put myself out of my comfort zone and played around with my images using photo editing software and found that by changing the hue and saturation of an image it becomes a whole new photo, this then lead to adjusting the histogram more or less than it should be, I became fascinated with this feature and ended up really liking the outcomes. Feeling positive I started sampling but soon realised I still had no concept or idea of what I was doing so any samples seemed pointless at this stage.
I really had not enjoyed a great deal of this project and was willing to give up on it.
I sat down with my sketchbook and again tried some media exploration and more cut out sectioning of my images, I was advised to look at surrealism after one of my tutorials and this found me being intrigued by David Hockney and his work with photo montages.
As shown on my blog, in my research folder and in my sketchbook I used his influence on my own images which started to help my work look somewhat appealing to me. After various different ideas had crossed my mind, I came to the decision that I was spending too much time worrying about my outcome that I had completely disregarded any thought of a concept or way to contextualise my work, this lead to me having one main focus point for the rest of the project (see chosen image). I then drew in various ways from the image and when I finally thought I was ready to start my samples it came back to looking at sections of this image and this is shown throughout my samples.
As my samples were quite small due to me looking at small sections I decided to try piecing them together to create a larger scale piece, so after I had done each sample I hooked it back up and knitted off them to attach them to each other, recreating the initial image. This lead to me again trying to contextualise my work and thinking about my samples in terms of where they would fit in the textiles world. As mentioned on my blog I like the idea of creating interior accessories (which I wish to further discuss during my assessment feedback) I feel that this could be an interesting career path as I thrive off the thought that I have produced something useful, that looks good and that always has a purpose in some way.
It had soon come around that it was almost deadline week and I did not leave myself a sufficient time to prepare and complete all of my final samples to standard that I believe to be exceptional, I didn't stick to idea of piecing the sections together as this proves to be rather time consuming and I would not be able to complete enough samples on time if I had continued this idea. I feel that if I had enjoyed the project from the start my samples would have come along in a much more professional way and I truly believe that not enjoying this unit has affected my outcome.
Overall I am somewhat satisfied with my samples as they are true to the images that I wanted to portray, in terms of the project as a whole I have not enjoyed it at all and I hope that in the next unit I can choose a project brief that is better suited to me and that I will enjoy throughout with as little misfortune as possible.
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