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...

More Good News

Just had an e-mail from The Royal Society of Painter Printmakers. Quite pleased.

Dear Kate

Thank you for entering the RE OPEN exhibition 2012.

The exhibition received submissions from 729 artists; just over 100 international artists and the rest from the UK. With each artist submitting up to 6 works, the selectors had the difficult task of making their selection from more than three thousand entries.

We are delighted to inform you that at least one of your works has been selected for the RE OPEN exhibition.

We will contact you again shortly with the details of which work(s) have been chosen and to confirm instructions for delivering your work in an exhibition-ready state to the Bankside gallery.

Many congratulations on having your work selected from such a strong submission!

Best wishes

Margaret Ashman, RE OPEN Organiser

and

Dr. Bren Unwin, RE President

I Won a Print....

...in the WinaPrint fundraiser run by 'Pushing Print' in Margate. It's a screenprint by Paula MacArthur.

What a fabulous surprise!

Grand Day Out in Oxford

Spent most of last Saturday mooching round Oxford which was just what I needed (and we didn't get wet!)

We went specifically to see the Jenny Saville exhibition at MAO. Her famous mountainous, fleshy nudes are even bigger than I realised and quite awesome. 
Also on show were a series of more recent drawings called Reproduction which were made after her children were born. They reference nativity sketches by Leonardo and Michaelangelo but are informed by her own experiences in that they are not idealised at all, but are nevertheless quite magnificent (and also very large). Two of the more Madonna-like drawings are temporarily hanging in the Ashmoleon sandwiched between works by Veronese and Titian. Very interesting to compare and contrast. I can't believe this is her first solo show in Britain.

I can never resist a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum when I'm in Oxford and we came across a charming exhibition called 'Out of the Woods: Prints and Wood Sculpture from Wytham' in the Natural History Museum next door. It was especially interesting because several of the carved lino and woodblocks were on show.  

Printmakers Robin Wilson and Rosie Fairfax-Cholmeley, and wood sculptor Simon Clements are currently artists in residence at Oxford University's Wytham Woods. They are working with the Conservator of the Woods and his team to create woodcuts, linocuts and sculptures which respond to the landscape, natural history and science of the woodlands. Its on till 30th September.

                              

We also had time to go to The Last Bookshop where all the books are £2 (another weakness of mine). The stock changes all the time but there is always an interesting selection in the 'art' section. Amongst others (!!!) I bought 'Other Worlds - The art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith' and 'The Remembered Present - Andrzej Jackowski'. I was really chuffed because Kiki Smith is an all time favourite of mine and I have only recently noticed the work of Andrzej Jackowski and there was a book about him! I really recommend this bookshop if you come across it. I know there's one in Bristol as well. The only problem is how to squeeze them on to the already bulging bookcase when I get home.

Maddening Collagraphs

"I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired. And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature...."