Freedom: Class mind map

I was not sure on how to interpret freedom so I talked to some of my family and friends (who are both male and female and range from the same age as me to 78) and discovered everybody had different opinions and ideas. My mum thinks education is freedom, one of my friends said equality whilst my Nannans partner said to be happy.

I then looked at famous quotes on the internet by people past and present and found the same thing, everybody had a different opinion.

All I could link in was individual.

I researched the Magna Carta as this project ties in with the 800th anniversary and I looked at the dictionary meaning for freedom.

This linked back to our group session in class where we did a mind map and again everybody had different ideas and meanings.

The class mind map, photo taken from the groups Facebook page.

This led me to look at the sheets we have been given and decided to turn them into a visual interpretation  of quotes and images of individuals perceptions.

I have looked at the mind map in class, ask family and friends, tweeted celebrities and with the different replies will try and find images to reflect the individual quotes/words.

Artist Profile of Noel Fielding

Noel Fielding is an English comedian, actor, artist, DJ and musician. Fielding was born on 21^st May 1973 in Westminster, London, and grew up in Pollards Hill, south London. As a child, when he first joined school, he was terrified. However, art was his saving grace; the teachers and students fell in love with his sketches and drawings and he soon made friends and settled in well. “I had always drawn, every day as long as I had held a pencil, and just assumed everyone else had too. It was like being famous for an afternoon. I made lots of friends and it helped me overcome my shyness and fear of school. Art had saved me and helped me fit in.”

Fielding was educated at Croydon Art College in South London. After that he then studied for a BA in Graphic Design and Advertising at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College (now Buckinghamshire New University) in High Wycombe.

His first exhibition was held at Maison Bertaux, a patisserie in Greek Street, Soho in early 2008 and was entitled “Psychedelic Dreams of the Jelly Fox.” Fielding claimed that he was inspired by the following artists: Henri Rousseau, René Magritte, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and Dexter Dalwood. Fielding revealed Salvador Dalí is an artist that has also made him feel inspired. A second exhibition took place at Maison Bertaux, from 5 July 2010 through to 5 January 2011 and was 

 entitled “Bryan Ferry vs the Jelly Fox.”

On 6 September 2011, Fielding received Honorary Masters Degrees from Buckinghamshire New University for his ongoing interest in the graphics area and support for many art organisations. In October 2011, Fielding released an art book called 'The Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton', which he produced alongside The Mighty Boosh cast member and comedian Dave Brown. It features many of his old and new paintings, drawings and photography, and showcases just how whimsical his artwork is.

The Saatchi Gallery showed Fielding’s video installation of “The Jelly Fox” and in 2012 he created a unique piece for Liverpool Love at the Museum of Liverpool which was inspired by The Beatles.

Choosing Fielding as an artist for this project seemed like an obvious choice to me; I have always loved his work and found it whimsical and intriguing but the main reason is because in my opinion, his art work fits this project and the word Freedom perfectly. His paintings may not be the best out there, but they are very expressive and free. “Reality depresses me. I need to find fantasy worlds and escape in them,” this quote by Fielding sums up his art work perfectly; he has an active and creative imagination and lets it show in his art, painting rapidly in bright and vivid colours—Fielding paints anything and everything his mind can conjure up. He lets his imagination run free on the canvas and it creates some very magical paintings.

Fielding has always inspired me with my own art work and has recently inspired me to try and be more outgoing with my own work. I have created some critical studies of some of his paintings as artist’s research which you can find on my blog post titled Noel Fielding: Artist’s Research.

Websites and books used for quotes and information: Wikipedia and his book The Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton

558 words

Georgie Lee

http://ceramicsworkshop1.blogspot.com/

Artist Profile of Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker is a London-based sculptor and installation artist. She was born during the year 1956 in Cheshire, England. She was raised on a Cheshire smallholding/farm.

Cornelia Parker has rural roots, as Simon Hattenstone for the Telegraph writes, "her sickly father had never been out with a girl until he was 34 and met Parker's mother, a German girl who had been traumatised as a Luftwaffe nurse in the Second World War. Life was tough and physical – mucking out the pigs, milking the cows. My father wanted a boy badly and didn't get one, so I was happy to be the surrogate boy. I was very strong, always doing manual labour."

I believe this is what made Cornelia such as strong character which is reflected in her work. (See my post titled Artist's research: Cornelia Parker)

She trained at Wolverhampton Polytechnic because she was turned down by the larger colleges in London. After her Masters degree Cornelia lived a bohemian lifestyle in the fringes of Eastern London where she worked from home. Later, Cornelia Parker studied art and received her MFA at Reading University in 1982. She was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Wolverhampton (2000), the University of Birmingham (2005), and the University of Gloucestershire (2008).

While she got teaching jobs in the art schools that had rejected her, she was opposed for years to the commercial art market, and wasn’t represented by a gallery until she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997. Parker is married to the American artist Jeff McMillan. She has a daughter Lily, with whom she became pregnant with at the age of 44. The pregnancy is depicted in a piece of art in which Parker purchased the night gown worn in the film Rosemary's Baby hoping to wear it for birth but it was too small so she displayed it as a piece of art.

Because she wasn’t supported by Charles Saatchi or any other rich collector – she wasn’t even represented by a gallery until 1997 – two of her important early works, which hold the key to much of her later work in terms of ideas, process and materials, were bought by the Tate. One was the shed; the other was “Thirty Pieces of Silver”, from 1988. This marked the beginning of a long relationship with silver, a material she has grown to love for its physical adaptability as much as for its powers of association.

When Parker was in her early teens, her mother, who was German, was diagnosed as schizophrenic. “She had been a nurse in Germany during the war. And I think horrors happened to her, which caused her to become mentally ill later on.”
She credits her father with her artistic skills even though they had an uneasy relationship.
“My father was English, and a controlling patriarch, quite dominant … towards the end of his life I sort of made peace with him. He was the most extraordinarily creative person and maybe some of my creativity comes from him.”

In 2001, the Galeria de Arte Moderne in Turin presented a major one-person show, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London commissioned a permanent installation for the British Galleries.
Her works are held by numerous public and private collections in Europe and the USA including the British Council, London, The Tate Gallery, London, Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut, ICA, Boston and MoMA, New York.

Parker will have her first solo show at Alan Cristea Gallery in October 2015.

The quotes are taken from her book ‘Cornelia Parker’ by Iwona Blazwick, with extensive commentaries, published by Thames & Hudson 2014

Artist's research: Cornelia Parker

"My art is about destruction, resurrection and reconfiguration: an exploration of the secret lives of objects and materials, both strange." Cornelia Parker


I first decided to research Cornelia Parker because of her work with the Magna Carta; I found it intriguing and I was interested with her bravery when she decided to take the document in a new, modern direction. The Magna Carta is a document that means something to a lot of people - it gave equal rights and allowed us to move forward as people - and I believe it was brave of her to recreate a modern version.

In my research I found out she  is a British artist best known for her installations. The work of Cornelia Parker is stunning just because of the scale of her installations, coupled with the exact nature of them. Parker uses objects that have strong social, cultural, or historical ties and presents them outside of their original context. This is why I believe she was the best choice  for the Magna Carta Project.

She linked old and new forms of creativity in this project by taking a photo on her phone and then chose embroidery as the final piece.

Her version is an embroidery of the Wikipedia entry of the Magna Carta, which anyone can contribute to. She used this aspect in her work, creating this project with a wide range of people including prisoners - this gave me this idea of bringing other people into my own project, asking them for quotes and their own ideas.

 

I researched further into her artwork and below are some examples and what I think of them.


Mass (Colder Darker Matter) (1997)
With this piece, in my opinion it looks like the wall behind is disintegrating and crumbling away; the mass of black in the middle is what would be the behind the wall. It is similar to negative shapes, and I find it very interesting.


 Cold Dark Matter; An Exploded View (1991)
For this piece Parker filled an ordinary garden shed with a jumble of items from car boot sales and then asked the British Army to blow it up! She then collected the debris and carefully assembled it into the installation shown. It gives the impression that the explosion is frozen in time. In my opinion, it is very powerful, and the shadows being cast across the whole room add to this; the piece demands to be looked at.












Neither From Nor Towards (1992)
This installation  consists of the bricks of a house that was situated on the cliffs of Dover. When the house collapsed due to cliff erosion the bricks fell down onto the beach below. They were then worn down by the sea. With the way Parker has arranged these bricks, in my opinion this is another powerful piece because it looks like the bricks are starting on the ground then working themselves back up; it is like they are trying to become what they once were. Parker has put the big rocks at the front and the small ones at the back to give an exaggerated perspective; it appears that there is more space than there actually is.

Evaluation of Freedom Project

When I was given this project I had mixed feelings. All of us in the class were provided with one word which was ‘Freedom’ and we were told we could it interpret anyway we wanted, using any media and style. I felt intrigued but also in control. This was a project I was totally in charge of and could develop how I wanted.

Then we were given a plastic poly pocket with 63 pieces of papers 10 x10 cm in size and we were told to use these as ‘sort of like a sketch book without a binder’ (tutor comment).  I looked at the packet and thought about how I could use the different selection of card and paper inside.

At first I did not know what aspect of Freedom to look at so I talked it over with my mum. One thing I could definitely remember was my final piece of work would go in the exhibition of the 800^th Anniversary of the Magna Carta. We looked at the Magna Carta page on the British Library website and followed a lot of the links.

The links led to articles on the American Bill of Rights, the Human Rights Act and UNESCO. All were in part inspired by the Magna Carta and were all related to how individual people should have rights, equality and freedom. This then led me to think about what freedom means to individual people and I talked about this with my dad. He advised me to think about the first thing that came into my head then disregard it.

With this in mind I typed in the words ‘What is freedom?’ in the spacebar on Google and saw what came up. It fetched up images of people dancing in a meadow with butterflies, rainbows, doves flying and breaking chains. Words and phrases it fetched included equality, empowerment, and freedom to be what you want.  I found none of this inspired me and I decided that this did not appeal to me as I have never been subjugated and chained up and if I want to listen to music or stare at the stars I do. I

did what my dad suggested and disregarded it.

After thinking about it and talking about it with family, friends and my tutors I decided to find out about what Freedom meant to individuals and also what freedom meant to me.

I did this by using a combination of primary and secondary research. My primary research involved me asking fellow students, tutors, family and friends from different age groups and genders the question ‘What does the word Freedom mean to you?’ I got a variety of answers and soon realized freedom meant different things to different people. It ranged from ‘those little things in life …’ to not being judged for what you believe in. I then interpreted this with looking for an image to match the quote and this is where my secondary research came in as I looked at books, Google, pinterest and various websites. When I found an appropriate image I then drew it using a variety of media (acrylics to prismacolour pencils) on the original cards and A4 paper (from watercolour to parchment).

I then followed on these interpretations for myself and listed things I am interested in such as music and films and looked at how they were related to freedom. Again I used primary and secondary research and interpreted this by displaying it in a variety of pictures.

Part of this research involved me looking at various artists and artwork and one which interested me was Cornelia Parker who was commissioned to create a piece of work to celebrate the anniversary of the Magna Carta.

On the 15 June 2014 (the 799^th anniversary) she took a screen shot of the Magna Carta Wikipedia page and had this printed onto fabric. This was then cut into bits and sent to chosen people who were all linked to civil liberties and politics (including prisoners).  Her quote ‘Wikipedia is a kind of embroidery, it’s very subjective with many contributions and anyone can add their bit’ inspired me and I can link it to my interpretation of Freedom. She showed an understanding of the word freedom depends on an individual’s viewpoint and I found it interesting that she worked with prisoners and took the Magna Carta in a new direction. Her working with other people inspired me to work with other people by asking people for quotes for my work the way she asked people to embroider her artwork.

Another artist who inspired me was Frida Kahlo. I liked how she did not let normal conventions and her illness hold her back. She made strong statements and still is popular today so much that one of the characters in Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy was based on her. The Guardian recently did an article on her wardrobe, which is the first time the public has seen since she died. She had her leg amputated and created her own prosthetic leg with a funky red boot which in a way reflects her freedom as an individual.
Another main artist I looked at and researched was Noel Fielding, mentioned above. His work is very inspiring, creative and expressive. In my opinion, his art work truly sums up the word Freedom because he lets his imagination run wild on the canvas without worrying.

My starting point for my 63 pieces of paper was the looking at the quotes and texts and decided which ones I could link to an image of Freedom. This then led me to think how I would present my work.  I knew it would be a book format but looked at a scrapbook and a photo album. I have used a combination of these to create a book that is a unique as the original Magna Carta. I have chosen to display it like this due to the quotes I have collected from people that are personal to them, and I wanted to leave that slightly pure and personal atmosphere in my work. Photo Albums and scrapbooks are sentimental and unique to individuals and are full of personal memories and I wanted to reflect this personal angle in my artwork.

I have developed my use of thinking about how to interpret set targets and make them personal to me. I have also started to develop the skill of analyzing words and reflecting what they can mean and how to represent them in art form. I have also found out that one thing can have much different interpretation to individuals and I hope that I have reflected this in my Book of Freedom.

Again I have not managed my time as well as I should and I need to look at time management.  I am pleased with my work but I think this has been an issue for me throughout the course and I need to make it a SMART target for when I progress onto next year.

I have evaluated my work throughout by a number of ways. I have talked to my tutors about my ideas and listened to what they have advised. An example would be when my tutor suggested I ask college students on my course about their opinion as well as my family and friends and this gave me more information to look at and evaluate. I have also kept a weekly blog and discussed my ideas with my parents.

I have found it challenging but I have enjoyed it. Interpreting one word can be daunting but leaves you lots of opportunities to express yourself. I do not think I would change anything, as I believe I have shown what I wanted to do which is that freedom means many things to different people.