Lecture 4. 25th February - Body Art

In this lecture we looked at Body Art, how the body is a place for art and how different cultures modify their bodies using tattooing procedures, and scarification. Tattooing of the skin has been around for many years and is used by different cultures to decorate the body but is also used to distinguish members of tribes or gangs by the different markings on their skin. In Africa, scarification is a mark of coming of age, and in The Yakusa, the Japanese mafia, members would have a tattoo to distinguish them as people of the gang.
Body Painting is also an art form, for example Henna tattoos are semi permanent tattoos, the Henna stains the skin a brown colour and can be painted on the skin to create different patterns.
Body Reshaping is also an extreme form of Body Art, this is where silicone implants are inserted into different parts of the face or body in order to reshape it, Orlan is a very famous artist who has used her own body to display this, by having pieces of silicone implanted into her face, and showing this to her audience by documenting it, she was also awake for these procedures.
Dr Gunther Von Hagens is a very controversial artist because he embalms bodies which have been left to medical science and has stripped them of their skin and shown the public their insides, he preserves these bodies by replacing the bodily fluids with plastics which means the bodies do not decompose and can be displayed for long periods of time. His work is controversial because these bodies are displayed in different positions which may be percieved as disrespectful but then they can be very interesting to doctors or students studying the body, because they can look at the body in much closer detail.
Performance artists also use their body as art, Orlan is one example, by recording her operations. Marina Abromovic is another performance artist, she liked playing with the past and present, in one of her works called Rhythm 10, where she made use of 10 knives and 2 tape recorders and played the game where she stabbed the area between her splayed finger, going back and forht through each space, and each time she cut herself she would pick up a new knife and start again. After she had cut herslef 10 times she would stop the tape and listen to her reactions to being cut and would then attempt to recreate this again and by recording it again.

Lecture 6. - 11th March - Time-based Art, Guerilla Art and Wearable Technologies.

In this lecture we spoke about different types of Time-Based Art, Guerilla Art and Wearable Technologies. we looked at examples of these and the body is related to theses fields in art. I was interested to find that Andy Goldsworthys work was time based, I really like his work, as its natural and ephemeral. I have been to see some photographs of his work before, and I've always found it interesting. I also found that time based art is not a new thing and that artists have been creating it for many years, like Muybridge who created multiple photographs depicting movement back in 1887. We also looked at Blast Theory which relates to all three of these themes, it involves playing a game, making a statement and people actually wearing the technology that allows you to play the game, it involves a group of people wearing a GPS system which tracks their movement around a city. You play the game on your computer, watching your chosen player move around the city while it looks for other players. We also looked at Guerilla Art (Activist Art/Political Art/Street Art) I liked how there were different forms of this Art theme, in contrast, Banksy with his graffiti art and Barbera Kruger with her Graphics, which reflect on Advertising and Commercialisation.
Other types of this art work may include :
To hack into a popular website and change certain things.
Library Books (to leave things in there)
Spray Paint/Stencil
Chalk Pavement
Fly Posters
T-Shirt Giveaway
Then we looked at Post-Modernism and how artists take something from the past and change it to become modern, taking something and giving it a new meaning. Art is for everyone, the wider audience and that its accesible to everyone. We then looked at Wearable technologies and how technology is moving forward rapidly, and we will soon be wearing computers into the fabric we wear and how there are 3 stages of technology. Ubiquitous Computing, which is the 3rd stage which means the calm stage of technology, where the technology receeds into the background of our lives and is not a massive part of our lives.
I'm not sure how these different Art form influence my work as such, but they do open my eyes to the different types of Art around and how I could take elements of these artists work and make it my own.

Lecture 5. - 4th March - Land Art, Earth Art and Environmental Art

In this lecture we were intorduced to the art movement known as Land Art, Earth Art and Environmental Art. We looked at how the body interacts with these art forms and one aspect of it is that the public can only really see these art forms from the air, and many people do not have access to this mode of transport and cannot really appreciate these works unless they see photographs of them which may not be as effective or may not impact the viewer as much as if it was seen in the real setting. I think this lecture was a real eye opener, I had heard of Land Art before and only really related it to the works of Andy Goldsworthy and his ethermeral pieces, where as in this lecture I saw how Lancelot "Capability" Brown was called an artist of the land because he change lanscapes to make them "more natural", which I didnt think was classed as some sort of art form but it makes sense now, he was changing the landscape to make it maybe more beautiful, by creating view points in which to stand from and look at the view and to see the vast land below. We looked at a lot of different types of land art and the one that interested me most out of all of them I think are the Nazca Lines, in Peru, i thought it was amazing how they could only be seen from the sky and were straight lines and shapes all over this plateau. From this lecture I learnt that there is a lot more to Land Art than Andy Goldsworthy (even though i like his works). I'm not sure how Land Art could link to my work, maybe the straight lines of the Nazca Lines could be incorporated as lines of stitch in my work, i'm not really sure but it bears thinking about.

Lecture 3. 18th February - Body Extensions

In this lecture we looked at the work of Rebeca Horn, who is a renound performance artist, who looks at the senses and extending her body. We were shown a video of some of her work and her discussing her pieces and who are her influences. She spoke about how her grandmother (who passed away before she was born), she said that they moved around a lot and lived a gypsy existence. She creates pieces of work which she wears in her performances, such as Finger Gloves (1972) where she wore extensions of her fingers and dragged them along the walls of a room, depicing how she could touch both walls at the same time, there is also Cockatoo Mask, which she wears in the video which covers the face, blocking sight which then increases the intensity of other sensations such as touch which she explored through the softness of the exterior of the mask. Body extensions and augmentations are all around us, we all have a body and can do with it what we wish, whether it be wearing clothes or glasses to tattooing and peircing the skin. There are even the extremes of plastic surgery in which people change the way they look in a drastic way. if i was to extend my body in any way, i'd like to extend my fingers so that I could reach objects which were out of reach. I like how this artists work has been kept for over 30 years but is such a prominent part of Art in the 21st century.

Lecture 2. 28th Jan - Tapestries

In this lecture I found out about tapestries and the history of them. We looked at how tapestries were made and their significance in history and how they were commisioned by rich people and didn't have to be decorative but could tell people stories or give them messages.
I learnt about how tapestries are actually made and how the pattern is depicted. Tapestries are made on a loom, there are 2 types of thread that make up a tapestry, a parallel warp thread and then another weft thread which goes across the warp and gives the pattern. The colour in these tapestires were created by dyeing certain yarns that they used, they dyed them using crushed beetles, fruits and anything natural plant which had a strong colour.
In the medieval times tapestries were mainly created in Western Europe, these tapestries were and alternative to paintings and could be transported across many miles due to their ability to be rolled up without damaging the work. Some tapestries were used to depict certain stories, some of biblical importance or some with an extended or a deep meaningful metaphor which is called an Allegory. An example of one of these types of tapestries is the Lady and the Unicorn, these were a set of tapestries, each one depicting each of the senses, there is another set of tapestries called The Hunt of the Unicorn, which depict the hunting and capturing of the unicorn. The two major interpretations of the tapestries hinge on Pagan and Christian symbolism. The pagan interpretation focueses on the medieval lore of beguiled lovers, and the Christian writings interpret the unicorn and its death as the Passion of the Christ.
I've never looked into the history of tapestries and I thought this lecture was really informative and interesting. In the last half of the lecture we were given a task to think of our own Allegory, and to draw a cartoon of our own tapestry as a group. We thought of an event in our lives in which we could all relate to, which was moving away from home and the feelings we felt in the first week of moving away. We drew upon medeival times and drew our home as a big castle and then drew a long winding path which was the road from our home to our home in Cardiff, then we drew our destination as an ugly place with goblins flying around it, this was to depict the sadness we felt when we left home and how we missed home a lot in the first week of living away. We drew trees around the long winding path to the castle to show the darkness of the forest and how we were feeling, leaving our home. We concluded the lecture by standing up and telling the group what our tapestry was about. I enjoyed this lecture and learnt a lot about tapestries and their meaning.

Lecture 1. 21st Jan - Textiles Timeline

In this lecture we were given a task, which was to look at our timeline, and think about where in our lives have we come into contact with textiles.
As a group 5 of us thought about all the different stages in life e.g baby, toddler, child, teenager, older teen to adult.
We then drew a timeline labelling these stages and then we wrote down all the different textiles we could think of that we had been in contact with. I thought this was a really good activity, it made us think about the many number of different fabrics and materials we come into contact with everyday let alone all our lives.