Looking forward very much to going back to college. Have some ideas for what I'd like to do. Was in RUA red for my first mentor day yesterday. It was really peaceful, basically just did my own work and wasn't disturbed much. Did try to get involved but there was only one lady there and she seemed to want to work alone for a while. Hoping I can keep going to it, have to see how college is.

Core

Consolidation

Bookmaking project college

Some things I did as part of the bookmaking project in college. This is teabags sown together, with the tea taken out and then blended with lascaux transparency medium. Then I screenprinted it onto the teabags. I began unsucessfully on the nice side of the sewn teabags, so then I had to do it on the badly sewn side. I could have sown more teabags but I was too lazy. Plus I always plan to do too much in college. There is still actually a little bit of tea in one of the teabags above, I had to remove it so they were flat for the nylon screen to print on. That was why I made the unsucessful print on the nicely sewn side initially, I believed in my naivety (I'm actually not a very professional printmaker) that I could print on full teabags that weren't very two dimensional. I had it literally rolled up in a shoebox under some roof slates I also had unsuccessfully tried to print on, (always over ambitious), I gave it to my mam cause I didn't really care and she went and framed it. I asked her could I take it out of the frame and put in a neater one. She said don't you dare, it's great, it all reminds me of you, even the crap sewing.


With these I was trying to recreate the look of a derelict Irish house from the 1950's with modern materials, in order to convey a very convoluted concept that made sense at the time. I burnt CD's, used corrugated cardboard, brown paper, paint, layers of dried paint, and various other things including but not limited to the kitchen sink. Not how I pictured it but whatever. I did try.

and flick...

Just a few bits 'n bobs

I love defacing and editing things in the style of artists like the Chapman Brothers and Dieter Roth. Specially like the idea of semi-opaque materials like masking tape, you get a narrative between your mistakes and your corrections but when you work over a surface like I'm doing here the masking tape allows for an intrinsic reaction to the materials involved.

On the second image you can see a ghost of where I began drawing and then changed my mind. This isn't really obvious in real life, it's just the light of the scanner.


This was just an illustration I did playing around, think I'm going to enter it as an application into the Abridged Art and Poetry magazine. This imagery for a poem came into mind whilst doing the picture, the two sort of created each other - perhaps since I used a biro to draw this it was meant to become a poem? I guess I'm just justifying the act of producing an illustration; which even the mention of is all very unseemly in the fine art department of NCAD.