OUFA403 - Fine Art Practices 1

The Fine Art Practices 1 project, titled Transformations, encouraged us to: "Do something, and then doing something to that". The aim was to  be regularly thinking about my work and how I could move it forward. Often this involved doing an action first and thinking about it's consequences after as a way of taking my practice to new places and to explore new ideas. This way of working meant I was free to experiment with a range of materials and processes that I was not already familiar with. During the project I expanded my ways of working in a couple of different ways, sometimes moving my work forward to explore a new theme and sometimes to explore a method of working or technique. 

My work throughout the project was supported through research on artists and ideas that I had come across throughout my explorations into materials. Experimentation a research was collated in a studio book and submitted along with a body of explorative work at the end of the project to demonstrate this.

I began my project by looking at the work I had made during the first week. I had made a small collage and arranged them in a frame as a way of exploring composition, space and shape. I manipulated the shapes I had been working with, playing with composition and location. I flattened and reduced down the piece and even moved it outside of the studio to see how the work looked on a less perfect background. 

I began to experiment with mono printing, at first using the abstract shapes I had been using previously in the module. However this evolved into mono printing onto magazine pages, tracing photographs onto the page behind them. This created interesting compositions as their was a uniformity to the magazines where the mono prints would fit aesthetically into the pages they correspond to. Expanding this idea of using magazine pages I began to experiment with print making, drawing and sanding to remove and cover up areas of information on the page. This created quite an interesting combination of aesthetic and conceptual ideas within individual works. 

Fine Art Practices 1 was a very exciting project as it encouraged constant evolution and change within the work I was producing. I felt very free to experiment with new ideas and ways of working which helped me to move my work in new directions. The foundations laid during this first practical project have supported my wider development throughout the rest of the year.