With Julian

Test tubes

So I talked to my tutor about my current development and ideas for this project, and this is the feedback sheet with further development and ideas I can consider to take forward.

Im pleased with the feedback given, I reckon there is good potential for these notes to be experimented with and progress onto possibly playing a role in my final idea piece.

What I would like to do next is to look more into using scientific wear and equipment and combine that structural, organised materials (test tubes) with a more natural and chaotic object use (leaves).

Because my terracotta leaves didn’t look as natural as I had hoped, I decided that making leaves with a more delicate and thin material that ranges in colour could be a good way to go in terms of development.

Here I decided to draw straight onto an old dried up leaf that felt like paper which had once been wet and dried up. Doing this little experiment was actually quite rewarding I would say, because I have used a fine point liner to outline the leaf and its prominent shaped areas, its given the leaf a comic like style which is interesting to see on a natural piece of material.

When I stuck them to the wall in an arrangement, it made me think about what it could be like to have a full wall of these leaf forms gathered together to create some kind of canapy.

Doing this has definitely opened up many more ideas and creative development options for this project.

Andy Warhol

I decided that adding Andy Warhol observational drawing would be good to include, I really like the simplicity of these drawings and I would like to try make 3D forms of some leaves influenced by these drawings.

What I also like about these drawings, is the off white tones that I’m getting from the image, it makes me think again about the types of background materials I could be using and experiment on.

Taking pieces of my final idea #2 I wanted to explore with clay again but by trying to make 3D leaf forms from it and painting them.

8 wanted to see if the idea could possibly be developed further by making these leaf forms, though I wasn’t really sure about the outcomes of them.

Because I used Air dry clay, a lot of the leaves were fragile and cracked easily once I started to paint them and hang them with string to dry.

Though, that lead me to consider the possibility of making a piece of work as a suspension piece for the final work. And to also think about using multiples so I could start to play with compositions and scale.

This idea is also based on the idea of using coping mechanisms for mental health and stress anxiety, I have known some people that use smoking as a method to relieve stress and use it as a detraction to keep there minds from thinking of what’s causing issues in their everyday lives.

The difference here though is that even if it’s believed to help psychologically, it causes more physical health issues but despite knowing this, people still take the risks. So this really is an insight piece to.show what lengths people will go to, to help their struggling positions. It’s really to express the importance of mental health and to let people get a view on what making decisions is like when you have mental health.

I do want to try create the leaf forms that are shown in the illustration, so I can start to develop my ideas more and more.

This idea is moderately influenced by my contextual research on Damien Hirst medicine cabinets, and based on what I said about how we can’t cure mental health because it’s more complex than that.

In the illustration, I drew out a box form labelled ‘anxiety’ which then shows pills scattered around the box. You’ll also notice that I added drawn flowers onto the box.

What I’m trying to show here is that if I could somehow use my go to place when I need some respite and make it into a medical form, that would then signify that my temporary medicine is this specific place.