The first week of my fashion and textiles foundation course was dedicated to research. Starting with trips to galleries and then more focused research in the library. Galleries that were visited consisted of the Phtographers gallery, Tate Britain, Hayward gallery, Camden Arts centre and Autograph ABP. The work that inspired me most was at the Photographers gallery where Tish Murtha’s work was displayed. Murtha’s work clearly captured real life scenes which I related to that made me want to look deeper into the photographs. Gallery visits I always find enjoyable as I think the process of walking between artwork means I take more time to look at the pieces and analyse them since I know, in the moment, I’m not going to come back to it once I move onto another.
Next came the library research. Before, Google was my best friend so not being able to use it I found strangely challenging. Having 3 words in my head (discarded, misunderstood and pressure), that were brainstormed in an earlier task, I browsed the shelves. This I realise now was not the best strategy as I feel like I wasted time searching for the unknown as I didn’t really have any ideas. If I were to carry out another set of research again I would brain storm some ideas first so I’d know where to start looking for imagery and more information.
Putting all the collected images and ideas together in the form of concept boards I believe is where I really got a sense of what I’m interested in and where I want to go with this new project of ‘Descent’. The visual representations I found enjoyable, however when it came to writing a short story/poem it took me a while to know how to start. Even though I was not very fond of this task I understand why the teachers asked us to complete it as it is another way of collecting ideas and combining them.
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