I was really inspired by the way Shillinglaw’s illustrations are made up of various elements about the person he’s describing. He puts in specific dates, obsessions, descriptive words, body parts and objects to create an illustrated collage of who that person is.
The use of both illustration and text to create the narrative in Shillinglaw’s work is beautiful because the illustration helps the reader’s eye move from one word to the next, helping them to take in the entire piece individually and look at each element in detail rather than losing some of them in the larger design of the piece.
In relation to the city, Shillinglaw’s work pushed me to look at the micro details of the city and dissect it in a way which meant I knew each individual element so well I could composite them together to make up the city like taking apart and putting a machine back together.
His use of a limited colour palette is really nice because it brings a beautiful element of simplicity to the otherwise chaotic and busy composition of his drawings. This is the way I went about portraying elements of the city as well because cities are so chaotic and busy that it is hard to make a cohesive piece about them without some part of it tying the whole thing together.
In the past when I’ve done video pieces, I’ve always used windows movie maker and I’ve found it a very bad, clunky piece of software which was hard to use and I couldn’t really do much with my footage.
Using premiere was great after having to deal with movie maker for so long and it was brilliant to learn about how I could create really professional, creative and well cut films.
We were given stock footage in the workshop to play around with and create a film from which was good because we hadn’t had time to film footage for ourselves and it meant I was much more focused on learning how the software works so that I can use it for my own footage in the future.
It was really fun to play around with clips and experiment with what I can do with premiere and it’s a program that I will be using a huge amount in my work from now on.
The zine in a day workshop was a really good opportunity to practice zine making, we looked at loads of different zines to inspire us so we had an idea of what we were doing before we started. I really liked that we got to collaborate in this workshop so that we all got to express our different styles around an idea.
We discussed loads of different ideas that we could work with for our zine and finally settled on the idea of the environment and how there are so few trees in Leeds these days.
We decided that we would each do 2 pages and then collaborate on the extra pages.
Left-hand page mine
Right-hand page mine
Right-hand page mine
Left-hand page collab
Left-hand page mine
I really enjoyed making this zine and zine-making is definitely something I want to do again at some point.
We began our ceramics workshop by making tiles around the theme of cities and signs. I really liked the type that they had and as I’ve been doing work in a circular format, I decided to use that for my tiles.
I started by making tiles with the names of cities all mashed together on a tile with various type. I quite like them because it’s like the chaos and bustle of these cities is portrayed in the way I set the letters and how I’ve used several different types to create my tiles.
After this I made a series of tiles based on the chapter titles in Invisible cities.
I really like the simplicity of these but for some of them like 6 and 7, they look a bit overcrowded on the tile.
After this we made mugs. I decided that I didn’t want a handle on mine and I’d use the eye stamp I used earlier to make a pattern inspired by the books, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket.
This was a good workshop but ceramics isn’t really my area of choice so I’m not sure how often I will be using this workshop.
Last year I really loved screen printing and I’ve missed not being able to do it over summer so it was so good to get back into the print room.
Because my design was one colour, two colours at most it was very fast to print it.
I found a pot of mixed inks that hadn’t been blended properly so decided to see how they would look when I used them with my design
The subtle swirl of different colours across the design looks really nice and I like that it makes it look more experimental than using one solid colour.
After this I tried printing onto different papers to see how it would work.
I like using different materials to print onto but these would look so much better if I put them onto a specific collage where is drew the piece together cohesively because I think that this image doesn’t really work on its own.
I really love screen printing and it would be really fun to experiment with further and push what is possible.
We had a workshop where we got to play around and creating images with found imagery. We started off by just playing with collage, seeing what worked and what kind of collage we liked.
I’ve done bits of collage in the past because it’s a medium that I really enjoy using so I started the workshop knowing the style of collage that I like to use.
I liked using text and semi-transparent layers to make my collage and adding in some drawn element over the top.
Then in the afternoon, we had to use the skills and elements of collage that we’d learnt in the morning and create a collage about the city for visual exploration. I decided that sewing mine would be a really good way of working into the image so I collaged my images together and put them into an embroidery hoop so that I could sew it.
I really like the finished result but I feel the text wasn’t very easy to see in the image.
The workshop inspired me a lot so when I got home I started to make my own collages as a continuation of it.
The first one I did was sewing the outlines of buildings, using colour to illustrate depth of field which worked well because the white outline is almost invisible
I then went back to the idea of embroidery hoops and looking at Invisible cities and made a small set of four in response
I found this workshop really helpful and collage is definitely something I want to explore in Visual Exploration
I had to read this book for an extracurricular project during my A-levels just before my trip to Venice and loved it so I thought I’d revisit it for this project as it has some interesting perspectives on exploring the city.
Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan of his travels across the world to various cities, categorising them under groups such as ‘cities and the sky’, ‘Cities and Names’, ‘Continuous cities’ and others. Slowly it becomes apparent to the Khan that Polo is in fact only talking about one city in all of these cities, his hometown, Venice.
Calvino paints such vivid pictures of fantastical, ridiculous, impossible cities with his words that you can see them in your mind and it’s a very inspiring book to read. You are transported to these cities that remind me of the hanging gardens of Babylon in the way that they are described as almost too beautiful to be real. Ironically, this is what I thought when I went to Venice and having read this book beforehand gives such an understanding to the beauty of the city and so much more than just pretty buildings and rivers in between.
It’s reopened my mind with how to look at the city, helping me to look at it with a more open-minded view and see it as a living, breathing, multifaceted being.
I want to reference this book alot in the work I do for Visual Exploration because of its varied perspectives on cities and what a city can be by looking at its different characteristics.
Today we had a digital photography workshop with David. Our first task was to go out in pairs and take photos of people and find out a bit about them and about their lives and pick our best shot to show. We found quite a few people but our favourite was of this construction worker because he told us we should go ask his colleagues for a photo instead because he thought they were younger and more handsome than him.
This activity, though enjoyable, was quite difficult for me because my anxiety made it hard to approach people and talk to them so I had to ask my partner to ask most people for me.
The next task was to take a 3 part photo series. Because Rosie and I both did foundation last year, we decided to base our series around one of the first briefs we got in stage one so we took photos that had an element of red in them and a line through the middle.
I was very excited for Light Night, many of the events seemed very exciting so I decided to head out alone so I could get to all the events I wanted to see and more in the few hours I had. I decided to just take my camera because my tripod would be a lot to carry and take a lot of setting up between exhibits which could have been very time-consuming.
Tears Of Angels Sharon Caton-Rose Oxford Place Methodist Church
This was the first piece I went to see and the second you walked into the room, you felt the mesmerizing atmosphere wash over you. As a pluviophile, I loved this piece immediately. I sat on the floor and let the sound of rain and the storm surround me as I looked at the piece
The thin, pearlescent aesthetic of the threads holding the crystals made it seem as if it were raining straight into the bowls below. It felt like a long exposure of the rain falling, the string being the motion of its fall, the crystals being the drops and the bowls being the splash as it hits the ground.
With the sound combined with it, it created such a meditative space to just sit and relax and enjoy the work. The projections on the walls surrounding me made me feel like I was sat in the eye of the storm, surrounded by rain and storm cloud without getting wet.
The only downside was that the other people in the room were loudly talking which ruined the meditative feel of the room. Maybe if one of the stewards had asked people to be silent, it would have helped preserve the atmosphere in the room. I really liked the way people’s shadows cut through the wall projections on the wall to make beautiful rain coloured silhouettes.
This was one of my favourite pieces I saw throughout the night, the atmosphere of it was so relaxing and I loved it.
Your Colour Perception Liz West The Crypt, Leeds Town Hall
This piece was supposed to feel like you were walking through a rainbow however I felt that it just felt like walking through a room with multicoloured lights. When I was walking through the different hues, I was transfixed on the transition of colour across my skin but it was just interesting lights, there was no atmosphere to it at all.
If the light had been more intense and there had been some sort of smoke or artificial clouds to hold it in the air, something that you can feel as you walk through, it would have felt so much more realistic, like you were genuinely walking through the sky.
I did manage to take some long exposures of people walking through the room so it blurred them all but the lights remained the same. I like these photos, but if it had been through fake smoke, I feel like it could have had a much more ethereal quality to both the photos and the room.
I did really like this piece, but it could have been vastly improved to make it more atmospheric for the viewer.
Painting With Light Michael Bosanko Millennium Square
From the advertisement in the programme, I thought that Bosanko would be painting fantastic images with light and long exposure in the huge tent in the centre of the square, however he was just taking pictures of other people writing things like ‘selfie’ which was exceedingly disappointing. I got bored quickly and it wasn’t impressive so the only pictures I took were long exposures of his lights with an emphasis on blurring them to create tracks
Wave Garden Paul Friedlander Millennium Square
Friedlander’s sculptures reminded me of kelp gardens in the ocean with the way they twisted around everywhere.
I took long exposures of them all to try and capture the full scale of their movement but forgot that the crowd and cars on the road were moving in the background and caused quite a distraction in my shots.
These sculptures were nice to look at for a few minutes but they didn’t make me want to stay and watch them for ages because they were pretty simplistic.
Drawing With Light Urban Projections supported by Lumen Arts Leeds College of Art, Vernon Street.
As this was Leeds College of Art’s piece, I was very excited about it but I think we went while people were still practising for it so it wasn’t my favourite thing I saw at light night but if I went later I think I would’ve really liked it. I tried to take some long exposure on my camera but without my tripod or a good perch, it didn’t work very well.
Prometheus Ashley Panton Upstairs @ The Carriageworks
I really loved this piece, the geometric shapes were beautiful and the lights syncing with the sound made it very mesmerising and atmospheric to watch. I got some really cool photos and sound from it as well but my phone ran out of memory quite quickly which meant I didn’t get much footage.
Life line
James Rosental
Main Theatre, Carriageworks
I hadn’t planned to see this piece but I’m very glad I did. It was a ten minute contemporary dance piece where the group of girls used rope to help their movements. It was amazing to watch and their movements were so controlled and concise. It was a really tight piece of dance and the group worked and moved together so well. The use of light to accentuate certain parts of the piece was amazing and the music was just subtle enough that you noticed it, but it’d didn’t distract from the dancers.
I was at a very awkward angle to try and photograph the performance, I was on the side balcony in the lighting rig and the lighting made it very hard to capture the girls’ fast movements across the stage
Although on paper, this piece didn’t initially appeal to me, I’m very glad I went because it was thoroughly worth a watch
Spotlight on Fashion fusion: East Meets West The business confucius institute at the University of Leeds Banqueting suite and foyer, Leeds Civic Hall
This was another thing I didn’t originally intend to see but I ran into two of my friends on Fashion Design and so we went to see the show. The first two designs were by first year Fashion design and Fashion communication students at LCA’s work who won an East meets West Chinese fashion design competition. It was an amazing show and fascinating to see what Leeds College of art Fashion students can achieve and the designs were stunning.
Then a singer came out and sung this beautifully haunting song in Chinese which really set the scene for the rest of the show.
After that, the rest of the show began. The clothes were beautiful, floaty and a wonderful modern take on tradition Chinese fashion. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a very good position and didn’t have a tripod so I couldn’t get very good shots of the show
There were designs around the room made from one of the oldest fabric providers in Leeds which were beautiful as well
After the show, I grabbed my friend to see if we could meet the designer as the show was partnered with LCA. When we asked, we didn’t realise we were talking to the designer’s translator and she took us over to meet the lady herself. She was really lovely and it was amazing to talk to someone so successful in the industry and network with people. She talked to us about the fabric and her inspiration for her work and then she offered to take a photo with us
We were so grateful she’d given us her time and left the building so amazed that she’d taken the time to talk to us.
The sun at night David Henckel Leeds Cathedral
This was the final piece I went to see. NASA’s footage of the sun was projected on a huge sheet in front of the alter in the cathedral. The sound of the sun burning was reverberating around the church at deafening volume which made you feel as if you were standing right in front of it which was incredible.
Projecting it on the alter really struck me because so many deities worship the sun as a god or God’s light that it felt like we were sat their worshipping the sun and basking in it’s glory.
All in all, I loved light night and I will definitely be going next year because everything was so good and nice to see
Ellie Massey 