Experimenting with Structure and Attachment

For my first brief I have looked at two individual words; structure and attachment. I chose various objects that I believe relate or signify the meanings and then studied them in detail, creating individual pencil drawings and also a colourful collages of them all overlapping. 

STRUCTURE 

Both words have many different interpretations that could take you down a number of diverse routes. The first thing that came into my head when i thought of the word structure was fabric. Fabric is made up of individual fibres and threads that create a piece of material. The pattern in which they are weaved or bonded together is their structure. 


At home i found a woollen blanket that when you held it up to the light you could see all of the individual pieces of wool that created it and also gave it texture. I thought that this could be used as an interesting starting point. 

This then led me on to my second idea, i thought about how the threads are woven together and then asked myself what other materials use weaving to form a structure, and i came to the conclusion of wicker. Wicker baskets and hampers are all created by weaving materials around each other. I also like the way that its like a repeat pattern, repetitive and simple. 

The third structure that I thought of was more straight forward, the structure of a building. The way I thought I could represent this was by looking at floor plans. i found a simple one and recreated it using mono printing, that was then used as a base to experiment with. 

ATTACHMENT 

Attachment I found slightly harder to think of examples. I think this is because it was less straight forward and more about what is personal to you. The first thing that came to mind was peoples attachment to music and television and how it can influence people. David Bowie's Hunky Dory album was my personal biggest influence when it came to music. This CD is also quite personal to me because it was my favourite album to listen to as a child and its also one of my dads favourites, so it reminds me of him. For the television part I found a mask with Del Trotters face on it, representing the famous television programme, Only Fools and Horses. Again, another childhood memory that I am personally attached.

The final object that i chose is again a lot more literal. I chose string. string is used to attach things together, keep things in place, so naturally I thought of it when finding relations to the word attachment. 

Once I was happy with the items I chose, we had a group task of drawing all the items both individually, and also merging them together all on one page. This helped us develop the pictures further by bonding the two words together and almost create new images that link to both words, rather than just one. For example i started using the string, that originally represented the word attachment, to create a weave which i first linked with structure. 
I think the exercise was useful as it got us thinking and experimenting with our own primary source of research. The main improvement that I wish i had done more of was experiment with colour. I only really used colour on the merged page and kept mainly to black and white on the individual close ups of the images. To enhance my drawings further I will most probably go back and at some colour into it, especially as for the rest of this brief we are only allowed to work in Mono. 

Peer analysis:  

I personally think that the drawings are strong but could do with being more detailed. If the line drawings of the images found around the university were smaller, it might have been easier to include more detail in the time frame given. If shading and lighting was taken into consideration then the images would look more realistic on the page and also look more like the object they are suppose to be. 

- James Heaver 

Taking the comments into account, the next drawings that i produce will be a lot more detailed, i like the fact the the drawings are large so instead of decreasing the size, i will take more time on each drawing to produce a realistic and accurate portrayal.