Rinse and Repeat exhibition at Freedom Hair Experience

I love doing craft fairs but have sometimes been disappointed in the past with lower sales than I'd hoped for (compounded by my chronic inability to price my work correctly).

At Dundee Ministry of Crafts last October however, I was reminded that events like these are such a great opportunity to meet people with unexpected consequences. I had a stall opposite Suzanne Scott of WhimSicAL LusH, a local artist I had known of but who I had never met before. We got chatting and a week or so later she got in touch offering me the chance to put on an exhibition at Freedom Hair Experience on Dock Street. Suzanne has been curating exhibitions at Freedom for a few years now and I was so grateful for the opportunity to be involved in the project.

Irving at Freedom gave me total creative control of the exhibition, so I got to design the poster, choose what work to include and produce a window display. I titled the exhibition Rinse and Repeat, as all of the prints I included had elements relating to water and pattern, and I liked the idea of the title referencing the unconventional setting. I installed the exhibition on Thursday night with help from Suzanne and Irving. It was so satisfying getting to fill the space with my work.

I felt really supported throughout the process of planning the exhibition and felt there was a real effort made to promote the exhibition. Suzanne did some filming with me which I'll blog about later and also interviewed me which you can read here.

The opening was last night and it went really well - Irving was so generous providing refreshments for the evening and I was really pleased with the turnout and feedback I got from people.

The exhibition is up until mid March. It's a great feeling knowing that so many people will be looking at my work! I'll post more pictures of the work on display and the process of creating the window display soon.

Fumetto

"Worlds – Where do you live and where do I live? Every story needs pictures, so I will make myself a picture of you. However, what do we really know about each other? How does your world influence mine and and mine yours? How does the world that we are creating together look?"

Following this oddly phrased brief for the Fumetto comic competition, I came up with quite an abstract narrative about two characters from different environments coming together and subverting each others' worlds.

The two characters - a disembodied hand and a pair of shears - live respectively in an environment delineated by positive/negative grids and a creased patterned fabric environment. The irony is that the characters are more suited to each others worlds, with a playful opposition of soft vs. rigid.

I spent a very long time working out compositions for each page, choosing a progressively more unconventional format to reflect the disruption caused by interaction between characters.

I chose to produce the comics using acetone transfers and screen-printing to clearly mark the separate worlds. I printed the characters on different papers and cut and pasted them onto the backgrounds which was more time-consuming than I'd anticipated - careful registration to integrate the characters into the prints would have probably been more effective, but I've learned my lesson!

The brief restricted the comic to a maximum of 4 loose-leaf pages of A4 or A3 size - here are my final prints on A3 paper:

Medal Project

"I propose to show that God, in creating the universe and arranging the spheres, had in view the five regular solids of geometry, and fixed by their dimensions the number, proportions and motions of the spheres."

I cast this medal in bronze using the lost-wax casting process. It is based on the 17th Century scientist and theologian Johannes Kepler's theory of Cosmic Geometry.

"The earth is the sphere, the measure of all; round it describe a dodecahedron; the sphere including this will be Mars. Round Mars describe a tetrahedron; the sphere including this will be Jupiter. Describe a cube round Jupiter; the sphere including this will be Saturn. Now, inscribe in the earth an icosahedron, the sphere inscribed in it will be Venus: inscribe an octahedron in Venus: the circle inscribed in it will be Mercury."