CHINESE ARTS CENTRE.

The other day, myself and Josie thought it would be a nice idea to explore Manchester even further and so we ventured around the city centre, collecting maps and going into the tourist information centre. It was here where we discovered that there was a photography exhibition by Chen Man being displayed at the Chinese Arts Centre in the Northern Quarter, and so we thought it would be a good idea to take a look. At first, it was very hard to find, with it being such a small, remote gallery, however once we ventured inside we soon became intrigued with all the photography displayed in a small, little room. Chen Man is a photographer who plays around with the juxtaposition of old and new, real and imaginary, ordinary and idea. She uses modern city landscapes and historical buildings in China as her backdrops to her photos and mixes these with street culture, animation, science-fiction and pop references. Her images are often heavily manipulated, with complex layers of post-production. The hyper-real aesthetic of her images creates a desire for unobtainable perfection. Although this exhibition doesn't necessarily link to out project, the concept of old and new Manchester and having a backdrop in our images/samples of Manchester might be a nice thing to think about?

Sketchbook- embroidery on the inside.

This is a piece I have been working on through the Easter break. I started thinking about some of the place we visited around Manchester and the idea of maps that had been developing over the last few group meetings since the start of the project. I thought I would start off by looking at maps of Manchester quite literally and tracing the outline of the city and some of the main roads running through...

ANN GODDARD.

I came across this designer when I first discovered Lucy Brown's work, as Ann is also part of the 62 group. She creates mixed media collections, constructed wall pieces and installations. Her work explores the concept of boundaries and human impact on the landscape. Her work is very organic and natural, like Manchester with its detailed brickwork and natural mosses and plants growing out from these. The idea of things growing out from concrete is a really nice idea to look into and relates to the idea of maps of Manchester.

Lauren Bowker

This talk was very insprirational and really encouraging. It was very interesting finding out about her collaborations from such a young age, and really the way she was pushing the boundaries and moving with the time.

Helped to encourage our initial worries about starting unit x and wanting to explore new techniques, her talk was very inspirational. 

It really helped me to not neccessarily worry about our outcomes, but to enjoy the whole process that we were starting.

Initial Brick Work Inspiration

After visiting Mayfield Station as a group we all were collectively inspired by the brickwork in the surrounding areas of Manchester. I have a few images of brickwork that I would like to start working from in the way of drawings and sampling.

BRICK WORK IN MANCHESTER.

Today we decided to explore Manchester and the brick work in particular which enabled us to decide on our colour palette with the use of pinks, purples, browns, oranges and yellows which seem to be the most popular colours within the brick work. It was also clear that some bricks in particular showed more texture which could be nice to explore with threads and hand processes techniques to create 3 dimensional samples rather than flat ones. Here are some examples of the bricks we saw earlier today: