Vivian Maier

Photos from various photographers provoke certain emotions in me that prompt ideas that I can use in artwork. 
I often enjoy an image that is either visually appealing, or tells a compelling story. Some images can be adapted into physical ideas around the use of space, lighting, he figure, shadow and reflection. These are all characteristics of a photograph I am commonly drawn to.

Vivian Maier's photographs are largely black and white and are for the most part a series of everyday images portraying humanity on the city streets. I'm drawn to her colour images as a passage for creative inspiration

Catie Newell

Curfew, Catie Newell

Curfew is a site specific installation provoking the loss of a larger space to fleeting apparitions of darkness and memory. Simply, the work is ghosting a darkened window, made of strange and violent spacial lines embedded with candlewicks burnt away and trailing smoke true to the term curfew (rooting in the French term 'to cover the fire' - it's the time to blow out the candles and go to bed). Fleeting and vanishing (both physically and in memory) the line work is a dance between the fewest lines that can be trusted, and the imagination projected on to a darkened reality. Suspended in the threshold between the two spaces, visitors to the show have to occupy the work - literally walking through it. Formally the aim is to evoke a larger sense of space (both real and imagined) and also calling to question the passing from one space to another - where perhaps on both sides, different darknesses exist. Its implications and threat of vanishing is the unknown reality, one that seems familiar, though always unfamiliar. Curfew remains something that is there amongst us, but anxious fleeting, and aggressive, though even frightened in its own being.

David Maljkovi

David Maljkovi - Retired Form 2008-10, photo collage on paper

- reflection
- distortion
- illusion

I first thought the image was of a sculpture with mirrored surfaces that gave the illusion of transparency. Turns out that in itself is an illusion, as the image is actually a photo collage. Now you see the lines, probably cut using a stanley knife.

Alumination

Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the work as it looked on the floor before I had presented it.

The work was all about texture; several people noted the subtlety of it. True, as at a distance it was indistinct, though it was apparent that the aluminum foil was not completely flat.

I invited people to walk on it, to further highlight the impressionability of the material. 

 The original texture was slowly lost the longer it was left in the corridor, making it less recognisable as the inverted texture of the wall it was displayed alongside

Eileen Gray

Black Block Screen, 1923

Eileen Gray was a furniture designer and architect, and I imagine a piece like this was intended more for interior decorating than art, but artistically I appreciate the repetition of geometric form, emphasised by the lack of colour. 

Alumination

Instead of replicating closed objects I decided to test adapting finer textures using one sheet of aluminium foil. Sparked originally by the idea of pressing the foil into the pavement outside and then installing it on the floor indoors.

Detail

The process was time consuming, but nearly as frustrating or difficult as the previous experiment. I used a piece of folded up fabric to press the foil into the bricks - this was more effective than using my hands for the most part, although sometimes the material would quite reach all of the detail.

The 1.5 meter lengths are taped to the wall at the moment, I plan to lay them flat on the floor of the corridor just before assessment to avoid them being stepped on (though allowing this could be an experiment for after)

There was some tearing, particularly in the cracks between bricks, but I feel this only further emphasizes the qualities of the material.

Nanna Hanninen

12 boxes, 2001

Fear and Security, 2001