This week was the beginning of a 5 week live brief called Creative Disruption. The brief instructed us to create an engaging and creative piece of wall art that will be hung, stood or stuck in any area of Markeaton street or Britannia mill campus we choose. The open nature of this task is exciting but it also makes it more difficult to decide on a theme, message and design.
As a group of 5 we must create a thought provoking and imaginative concept and design, we then need to create a mock up of how our design would fit in our chosen space. During the lecture I jotted down a few initial ideas and one of them was about using the lift as the space and basing our design around claustrophobia or fears. Luckily, other members of my group had also thought of this idea and as a group we refined it and decided that this was the direction we wanted to go in.
Our idea is to create a design where lots of strange and intriguing characters are squashed together, our artwork will cover the walls and ceiling of the lift, making anyone inside it feel part of a twisted reality. Our aim is to replicate and visually represent the feeling of claustrophobia by using playful and exaggerated figures to create questions in the viewers mind. The reason we decided that the lift is the best place to design this is because it is a confined space and when the doors close the person inside is enclosed . On top of this, lift experiences are often boring and I always find myself turning to my phone for entertainment or reading the odd poster stuck to the wall, this makes it the perfect spot to transform into an engaging environment. The artist’s style that popped into my head whilst discussing this was Jon Burgerman’s because of his unique characters and his ability to fill every gap on the page.
In order to develop our project further we created a group action plan stating what each person within the group should do ready for our meet up next week. These jobs included, researching and sketching out compositions, researching augmented reality, researching lift instalments and creating character designs. My allocated job was to research claustrophobia.
I found that the definition of claustrophobia is an extreme or irrational fear of confined places. Looking on the NHS website I learned that it’s normal to fear being trapped when there’s a genuine threat, but people with claustrophobia become fearful in situations where there’s no obvious or realistic danger. I think this can link well to our imagery because we plan to make our characters look strange and unrealistic. Whilst researching I thought about using our wall installation to raise awareness for claustrophobia, only 10% of the population are affected by the condition but lifts themselves are a common trigger. We could link our art to charities such as Anxiety Alliance and Anxiety Care UK which provide information and advice about how to effectively manage anxiety and phobias.
Illustration by Steven Dana (left) and George Grosz (right)
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/claustrophobia/
The second part of Creative Disruption is all about Augmented Reality, something that I knew nothing about and hadn’t heard of before this week. We were taught about an app named Blipper which works by linking codes or images to websites and animations, this means that when someone uses the Blipper app and scans a trigger code, a certain website will pop up. Linking to our task, this is a feature we can use to add an extra layer of meaning and interest to our wall art. As a member of my group is an animator they have offered to work with us to create a short animation that will appear when someone scans our wall art. I am intrigued to see how this will work and in the meantime I have downloaded Blipper in order to grasp a better understanding of how it works.
In regards to meeting another practitioner, unfortunately I received no replies from any of the illustrators that got in contact with me through Ness Wood. Ness stated that due to it being around the time of the bologna book festival when I emailed they might have been too busy to respond. On a more positive note, although I was initially going to join a friend and go to London to visit illustrator Hannah Warren, this plan fell through due to her busy schedule however she did agree to answer some of our questions over email, which will offer me an insight into the world of freelance illustration.
Copy of emails I sent to three illustrators and am awaiting replies
Heather's Illustration Blog 