IMPRESS Print Festival 2013

http://www.gpchq.org.uk/impress-festival13/

The IMPRESS Print Festival organised by the Gloucestershire Print Co-op is on throughout March. There's tons to see snd do. Click on the link to the festival calender so you can have a look....

Most exciting for me is that Hughie O'Donoghue is exhibiting at The Museum in the Park and giving a talk on Friday. He's one of my favourite artists. I think there's still a few tickets left.


I AM IN THE CATALOGUE WITH HUGHIE O'DONOGHUE!

 

 

 

 

 

The Adventures of Bird Girl

Following on from the last post....
I later made up my own story about one of my bird people and did some large A1 charcoal drawings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My tutor at UWE suggested I shouldn't have put the door and window into the second drawing. The location is best left unspecified.
The terrified creature in the last drawing is a little doll who, when I divested her of  hair and clothes, turned out to have a body made of wire rope. I recently discovered that the collective noun for spiders is 'a clutter'. Sounds noisy somehow. I think I'd like to copy my spider doll and make a clutter of them. With their porcelain arms and legs I'm sure you'd hear them coming. But will this one will survive her present ordeal?

Bird dolls

       Last year I went to an Edward Lear exhibition at the Ashmoleon in Oxford which included some of the little drawings which accompanied his letters and nonsense poems depicting himself as a bird.              
                                        

In many of the Grimm's Fairytales humans are turned into birds and I was inspired by Lear's drawings to have a go at some 3D versions. Originally I was going to clothe them but in the end I decided they'd be more useful plain.




 

This started me off looking into using dolls to tell stories and suggest alternative fairy tale senarios.

It's been a while....

and a lot has happened... including the fact that I am currently enroled at the University of the West of England to do the 3rd year of my degree in Drawing and Applied Art. It was now or never, before the fees got too ridiculous. As it is I am doing it part-time over 2 years.

The first semester was taken up largely with the dissertation - mine was entitled Fairytales, Fine Art and Feminism, and that's broadly the area of  my artistic pracice at the moment as well.
When I first enrolled I imagined I'd be concentating on printmaking - and I did work on my ideas for alternative endings for fairytales, for a bit - but then I got side tracked by all the interesting stuff I was looking at for my dissertation. The great thing about being part-time is that I have time to play and experiment with mediums that are unfamilir to me, like ceramics. I've just had an assessment and, so far, my tutors are OK with me exploring a range of ideas and I'm really enjoying it. My fellow students are very supportive and I'm learning a lot from them. I rather think they regard me as 'the eccentic old woman who makes weird dolls', but that's OK, they're a nice bunch (and I'm not the only oldie).

Below are a few of my sketches and ideas for prints for the as yet unfinshed Alternative Endings series. I got the original idea from some cards I bought of a woman dancing with crocodiles.

 

In the next few posts I'll get you up to date on what I've been making, drawing, painting, printing...