I began this project with another trip to IKEA Coventry to do an A3 (or nearly A3) pencil sketch of the city centre. I used the drawing below as the initial inspiration for the project:
I approached this project by doing some observational drawings in a couple of locations in the Coventry city centre as I live in Coventry this seemed the perfect place to focus on for.
I wanted to try and get a more elevated perspective of the city centre and the best place I could think of that provided this was the IKEA cafe. From this place you can view the expanse of the city. I picked a spot and began drawing trying to focus on perspective at first.
In my first post about this Assignment I focussed on the initial drawings and creation of a design for a print on the theme Natural Landscapes.
I ended up devoting a bit more time to planning the printing method and the colour choices for printing. I wanted to do a linocut print and also wanted to go for a multicoloured print but didn’t want to go too excessive in terms of having lots of blocks to carve (simply to save time to move more quickly onto the next project).
So I decided to do some single blocks and some reduction method printing. In the end I had four blocks of lino, two of which were carved again to give me 6 layers of colours in total.
As I began to look into the piece I did get slightly confused as to what the piece was, was it the documentary, at 1 hour and 3 mins in length, was it the objects and timeline in an exhibit?
I ended up watching the documentary, thinking that was the piece itself only to then realise it was part of the piece alongside the exhibit. Anyhow I found it helpful to make some notes whilst I watched the documentary, I tried to make notes on the form of the piece and any way in which Deller’s piece raised themes such as time and place. I’ve scanned my notes so you can read them below:
Notes on assignment 1
Notes on assignment 1 pt.2
Notes on assignment 1 pt.3
I found the notes helped me to begin thinking about what would be the main part of my essay and also helped me think about how to introduce and conclude my arguments. I then set about reading the recommended information from the Tate website and the Critics reviews in the Frieze and the Guardian.
I have definitely found that reading the Critics reviews has provided a sort of sounding board for my own views, sometimes I agree with their views or they help me expand on my own, other times I disagreed but it helped me to consider why.
Reflection against assessment criteria:
Demonstration of subject based knowledge and understanding:
I think I’ve demonstrated some subject knowledge, probably mostly around what we learned about formalism, and used that knowledge to help form my arguments in the essay. I’m unsure of how successfully I used knowledge of the theme of place – as this felt like such a broad topic, so I only really touched upon it in the essay.
Demonstration of research skills:
The number of sources was limited for this assignment but I think I demonstrated good use of them, picking out references that enhanced my or explained my points throughout the essay. The sources were all digital sources though so in that sense fairly limited, I imagine this will change with following projects.
Demonstration of critical and evaluation skills:
I think in my essay you can see a clear attempt to begin to grapple with concepts and debates around Deller’s work, and some evidence of analysis of the form of his work. In my learning log there is reflection and some critical thinking although this could definitely be increased.
Communication:
I tried to present the essay to the required standards, using double line spacing, the Harvard referencing system, good sentence structure. It’s been awhile since I’ve written essay’s so I think some of the flow of the piece is a little halted but I’ve tried to make use of basic essay writing principles, there’s a clear introduction, middle, conclusion.
