A colourful post

Just Colour from Jesper Kirkeby Brevik on Vimeo.

Beauty in Unexpected Places

Arty stuff

Well - another crescendo over - the mad rush at the end of term to get our artworks and PVR's (Personal Visual Diaries) finished, polished and in the gallery.  (Marks are about 75%/25% PVR /final work, so if it all turned to custard, the process and exploration would theoretically see us pass).

The 'fine arts' class (us) had two final works due this week.  The first one was a sculpture which was in and marked and out on the same day. The brief required it to be 'related to our ceramic studies, but not necessarily made of clay'.  The range of subject and material coming from just 18 people was absolutely fascinating.  

There was:

a full-sized cardboard donkey

a collection of exquisite, palm-sized New Zealand ceramic native birds, painted with their appropriate colours and glazed

a suspended clay sculpture that was part Maori canoe anchor and part wings, bound together with rope

a huge 2-foot papier-mache egg in a feather-covered egg-cup

a large skinny black hare in mid-leap with white fangs, shards of mirror for claws and four eyes

a work consisting of 13 black, white or red decorated skulls of varying sizes evocative of a Mexican 'Day of the Dead' altar

a hanging mobile of pink condoms filled with flour and each tied with a pink bow, suspended under a barbed-wire 'crown'

Three clay tiles incised with symbolic patterns and set in a huge block of stone

an old phone box with a 1950's skipping rope instead of a receiver, and the cavity in the back containing a tin of condensed milk, seashells, and a large black ceramic cricket.

My contribution was a jug made from an old sports coat:

Katherine de Chevalle   Herringbone Pitcher  

Recycled coat and lining fabric, Dacron fibre and coat label          

35 x 35 cm

The second work was the result of choosing one of the art movements we'd covered this term, and creating an original piece in that style. Comprising work from the 'graphics lot', and 'us', there are now being marked in our little basement gallery almost 40 works ranging from one or two crap to a huge majority of intriguing, or funny, or thought-provoking, or stunningly beautiful, or technically slick, or clever (or combinations of more than one of those).

To be honest, I think these two exhibitions have beaten hands down anything I've seen yet in the 'proper' gallery in the city.

Here's my second work; a painting in the abstract expressionist style.

Katherine de Chevalle   Enkindled Spring   Acrylic on canvas  90 x 60 cm

Eye Candy Day 11