Project development: more stop motion animation

G4 visit to the waste disposal depot

Project development: practice stop motion

 These images were taken on my recent visit to the Whitechapel Gallery

Borrow...or steal!

Found this great video which I love! Think this would be great for anyone in the group that is using a shirt as one of there found items, as it shows alot of innovative wears to display it on the body (good idea for final display? use idea in final video?) Has inspired me to dig out all my old shirts and start experimenting!

Drawings

 Pencil design ideas- The inspiration for these designs was taken from images collected from the library. To get more designs out of these images, I have reduced them and made repeat patters out of them, and also enlarged the images as to zoom into detailed sections.

Liverpool Art Prize 2012

Robyn Woolston

Robyn Woolston

G4 attended the Metal Gallery at Edge Hill Station on Thursday evening for the preview of the Liverpool Art Prize. We were there to support Robyn Woolston who we are collaborating with on the Dress Code Project. Robyn is one of the short listed artists, along with Alan Dunn, Tomo and The Drawing Paper's, Jon Barraclough and Mike Carney. 
Robyn's installation was amazing, a Silver Birch Tree at the centre of the room, which was in total darkness. The floor was covered in thousands of plastic utensils making a disorienting and uneven surface. 

The Drawing Paper

The Drawing Paper

Alan Dunn

Alan Dunn

Design Museum of London: Design of the Year 2012

Issey Miyake and Reality Lab, the Japanese designer’s research and development team, have won a coveted “Oscar” from the Design Museum of London. Among the extraordinary inventions and progressive ideas are the winning outfits from Mr. Miyake’s studio that seem to encompass different kinds of modernity: clothes that fold flat, opening with 3D dimensions and made from recycled polyester.

Just looking at the mathematically calculated designs, creating prisms of unfolding shapes, is to realize that the Pleats Please invention from Mr Miyake, which started nearly 25 years ago in 1988, was only the beginning of a series of futuristic ideas.

Miyake's 132.5 line
is made from recycled polyester

Whitworth Art Gallery

Today I visited the Whitworth Art Gallery to see the Cotton: Global Threads exhibition. I really liked that it was a textiles based exhibition and enjoyed looking at all the ways cotton has been used. Below are some exmaples of African Textiles that were on display at the gallery...

• 

  SHWOPING!!

  I went to the launch of shwopping on brick lane, it was incredible they had covered buildings froms head to toe in 2nd hand clothing.
  
  Shwopping is about bringing an old item of clothing into an M&S store with you (even if it’s not from M&S) each time you come to buy something new. You can put your old items into a ‘Shwop Drop’ box (you’ll find these by the tills in most stores). All clothing goes to our partners Oxfam and then they either resell it in one of their stores or on their website, forward it on to those who need it in the Third World, or recycle the fibres to make new material (which businesses like M&S can make into new clothes). Absolutely nothing goes to landfill. Oxfam will use the money raised to help people around the world overcome poverty.
• All clothes shwopped at M&S are given to Oxfam. Oxfam then:
• • Resells clothes – in shops, online, at festivals or through overseas enterprises, like Frip Ethique in Senegal.
• • Reuses clothes – garments that can’t be worn again are sold to designers who restyle them for use in new collections.
• • Recycles clothes – even if they don’t make the grade, old clothes are never sent to landfill. Instead, they’re sold in bulk to reprocessing companies where they could be reborn as mattress filling, carpet underlay or as a last resort, incinerated. Some of the garments will even be turned in to new fibres for use in new garments.
• • Not a stitch is wasted – every penny raised helps fight poverty around the world.

What is the issue with clothes going into landfill?
• Approximately 500,000 tonnes or 1 billion items of clothing are sent to landfill each year - that’s 114,000 per hour. Neither the planet’s landfill sites, nor its resources, are infinite and we know that placing unwanted clothing items into the bin (and therefore into landfill) when they could be recycled or re-used – is not sustainable. We hope this project will help see a move away from ‘disposable’ fashion where we throw away clothes when we’ve had enough of them.

• Shwopping is about challenging and changing the way we all shop. We’re not asking you to stop buying clothes, rather aiming to create a ‘buy one, give one’ culture, where reusing, recycling or reselling old clothes becomes the norm. Half a million tonnes of clothing end up in UK landfill every year and we all agree this can’t continue. So instead of storing up problems for tomorrow, M&S is calling on the UK to become a nation of shwoppers, where we breathe new life into and reuse old wardrobe favourites.
  
  http://www.marksandspencer.com/FAQ-Shwop/b/1723541031

Whitworth art gallery

Thought this piece was interesting as it uses recycled clothing so we can relate to this, sorry about the picture not sure how to rotate on this!

and this piece all the clothes have been bought from charity shops and remade and worked, thought this linked really well with the stuff where doing at the moment.

Whitworth art gallery

Thought this might interest you David..

Lighting Induction

Attended the lighting induction yesterday which was incredibly helpful. Geoff the technician went through all the different units that were available and the various output from each. We were also told about various filters and gels which are available and their effect in, filtering, diffusing and distributing the light.

NHM-Weird fish

At the NHM I had a look at the ecology section and came across a really bazaar fish, that goes into the ground to survive. The fish will squish its self into the mud below the former water source it was living in, this is amazing that this fish has figured out away to overcome his problems (water drying up) and gone lower into the earth to soak up enough water to survive. This though is intriguing, it made me wonder about what adaptations we in the future will have to make to survive in the potentially hostile environment we may face.

Poster design

When designing my poster I took many things into consideration. I wanted to keep it simple, but catch the eye - so I went with a cartoon of a reclying bin with our group name above in bright colours with the locations where the bins will be below. To try to incorporate the Photoshop skills learnt in previous classes, I used Photoshop to layer the drawing and writing with computer typing, and colouring in the words. Although I ended up going over the letters again with pencil crayon, just to give it a bit of a hand rendered look ( just to make it not as flat). I looked at many different kinds of posters but my main inspiration for the poster design was from my favorite flyer - given to me at the student fare to join lacrosse. The poster was simple, but it grabbed my attention and made me laugh! because of this its always stuck. Just like this poster i wanted to design something that would have this effect on others, and make them want to join in, grab their attention and help !

Posters Attack!

Almost every place we put the posters and bins up we photographed !
- outside the A4 and more store
- the door of the foundation block
- inside Geoffry Manton (and on the doors)
- all over the studio (including the stairwell)
- we have all put some up in our blocks/halls
- we tried the library but they wouldn't let us....as if
basically anywhere public were allowed !

See the full gallery on Posterous

Loyds TSB

When I was walking around Manchester Picadilly gardens the other day I came across a group of people protesting against Llyods TSB bank. I spoke to one of the people participating, he said they were doing this to make people aware of how un-ethical Lloyds bank is and how people should move their money accounts to other banks like The Co-Operative. I had no idea before this that banks could even be un-ethical.
http://www.dontbankonlloydsethics.com/2011/10/chapter-4do-lloyds-banks-unethi...
This website explains how a bank, in particular Lloyds TSB can be un-ethical to its clients.This demonstration caught my attention, so much so i stopped and started talking to the people protesting, they made me aware of something I had no previous knowledge of such a thing even existing. Im thinking maybe we could approach our advertisement for getting people to donate clothes to our cause, because I imagine most people wont even be aware of the situation (much like how I wasn't aware of the Lloyds TSB thing.

This image above I took of the protest, I wish now I had taken a video of it because this picture doesn't portray the mood they were making. The group was playing loud music - to grab the attention of people walking by - they were also talking loudly on a microphone adding to the attention grabbing.The group, I though got the people around them and walking by to notice them, equally getting these people to realize this issue. We as a group had discussed handing out flyers along Oxford street to get people to donate clothing, the only problem is there's so many people doing the same thing its hard to get noticed. I know I do it - in fact I don't always even read them! So to get ourselves noticed were going to have to do something obnoxious, like the people in the group above to get attention.We spoke to Julie about ideas, and the possibility of getting the drama students to get involved, were thinking they could dress up 9obviously as something relevant to our project) and hand out fliers......surely that would get people interested ???

American Apperal

I have been searching around their company website and reading about all of the different ideas and groups they support. As a company they seem to be the idea one; no sweatshop labor, recycle left over materials, appropriately dis-guarded of dyeing waste, use their own employees and models, produce a line of organic clothing using only natural fibers, they want to legalize gay marriages and immigration to LA and currently are helping support Haiti after the disaster that occurred not so long ago and alot more.
http://www.americanapparel.net/contact/
The clothing is relatively well priced, good quality as i have a few pieces from them and are still in very good condition, the clothing also NEVER goes on sale; and after reading all of this about the company I can understand why this is. They are so fair with their workers and ecological footprint on the earth it is right they price things the way they do. They really are an all American Apparel company, which personally I believe in....who wouldn't they have great ethics.
Their advertisements are very proactive, a good work tactic seeing as it grabs the on lookers attention. Some of them are a bit racy but i feel like the adverts show passion and the real side of people, not air brushed modes.
americanapparalad.jpg

DressCode

 My ideas for dress code relate to this project. In the Eastend old is the new new. So the use of old artifacts used reflects this idea. I want to create pieces that contrast with the hash city environment. I like the idea of finding a calm space in a busy city, something fresh and soft.(like Dry the River). I think using 2nd hand, recycled clothing and fabrics from the area will help reflect the community. Also the idea of layers that you could add and take away would represent the layers of history, the permanent and nonpermanent parts on the street.

Manchester Museum

_{The past is part of the mirror of understanding the future and time. An Museums are a perfect way of collecting the past and a way to interpret time. Museums are a collection of artifacts and documents from the past. They normally contain things that hold culture or historical value, they are away of preserving time and historical events. Many museums can be found in schools, colleges and universities for academic use. I went to Manchester Museum because not only did it relate back to my Manchester theme it was a people for the community of Manchester. It also housed history and I feel to understand the Community Couture video and the future I needed to look at the past for inspiration. I found extinct animals and I feel like in the future this problem will get worst and we should begin to solve it now along side our trendless world.}

Embroidery workshop: Sampling

Jessica and I decided to have a day in the embroidery studio this week. We wanted to start to experiment with various fabrics and start to transform and manipulate the surfaces of our given grounds. Jessica worked with the embellisher, getting a feel for which of the fabrics that she had chosen, worked best and gave the more interesting results. I worked with Denim and with the large pin tuck foot. I sewed multipal lines,  looking at how the fabric transformed when gathered together, creating a new and a more pronounced three dimensional surface. 

Pin tuck foot

Pin tuck foot, reversed

New workspace: Hotspur House

This week we have moved into our new workspace at Hotspur House. We have brought down to the venue all of the garments that have been collected and donated so far and have started to display them in the space. Hanging the garments, has allowed us to view them differently and helped us to begin to choose items we would like to work with and explore further. Although we shall still be working on campus from time to time, we felt as a group that this move would help us connect with the studio and help us to build a deeper dialogue with each other and our new surroundings. The 'Dress Code' project which we are collaborating on with Robyn, Jai and other TIP colleagues is also being driven and directed from this site, so it also keeps us in daily contact with them. To get the group up and running in our new setting, we have organised self directed drawing sessions for Tuesday and Wednesday.

A Festival of Colours

The Festival of colours, known as Hoil is a celebration of the welcoming of spring and a celebration of good conquering over evil. The celebration involves people chasing each other around and throwing colourful powder over one another.