Seeing the Mould Cultures

So a week on, we have gone back and looked at the mould cultures we collected from different places and photographed them, and seen them under microscopes.

 This one is the most different because it is like a fuzz across the agar instead of a 3D shape and it links in witht the textures I used previously. Also the colour is beautiful.

 These two plates bring in new colous witht the dark green and the peach orange, and mustard yellow. These could be a good contrast and something to set off the powdery blues.

 Using the mould as a filter where you can see Manchester behind. This could be a way of linking the city with the project.

 We can now start using the colours we have from tht mould to inform our colour palettes, thankfully my colours already linked in with the moulds, especially the one above. There so many otherexciting colours we can add though! I love this luid green just oozing out of te top of this culture.

These are going to encourage me to start working more 3D. I don't want to just recreate the mould I can see though, so I am planning on drawing very frrly with the shape, texture and colour as inspiration. I want to create small scale on a big scale, really detailed. We are planning to draw collaboratively from the images on friday but I would like to start some of my own before hand.

I need to star making a colour palette with thread and gouache!

Monday 23rd Group Meeting

Picking up the cam-corder so that we can use it for the filming on Thursday. Julie stressed how we were not working so closely as a grup as we should be ding so we are going to meet up on Thursday and Friday to film, draw and make together and photograph, film and draw our results. I think this will be really useful for us to bond more as a group and to really produce a large body of work that we can then go away over the weekend and work on seperately.  We had two new ideas aswell... The idea of adding a clinical and sterile aspect of the microbiology department by using a lot more white, then adding in colour through embellisments and the leaking of paints; and the idea of surgical tubes and sending black ink through them to show disease flowing through the body and then adding holes to the tubes to have the inks dripping onto the body aswell. From these we could add the made samples growing from the leaks.

Over all it was a successful tutorial, apart from missing one person. But I felt we are coming up with ideas more, so if we work more as a group we can do this more often and get really strong ideas.

Embroidering onto willow

I now moved the sewing samples onto willow to make the willow more alive. The spreading of the mould across the wood creates moement and looks as though it is grwing out of and trapping the willow structure inside. It is feeding on it. I love the combination of something so natrual wuth a sort of simulated natural embroidery.

I believe more natural materials will be used in the future and I want my work at the moment to reflect that. In the way that China fully encompasses their natural materials such as bamboo, I feel it is important for us to the same, and things like willow will be perfect.

Drawing French Knots

I also wanted to draw the french knot samples before moving on with the making.

I painted in a very similar way to before with the mould, and then added details of the stitches in afterwards with fineliner. I really love working in this way.

Drawing the making

After working very loose and drawing very freely and expressively I decided to control my drawing and produce some pencil drawn detailed images.

These were really fun to do because it was my opportunity to create something realistic and I gave myself time that I would not normally give to draw one piece and really capture the shape and shadows.

These were then loosened up a bit to add colour and movement. I like drawing with pen and then adding colour loosely over the top; mixing the paint on the paper and I would like to do this more, on a larger scale.

Making!

The work in long strips was nice but I wanted to experiment with natural shapes, and the cirlce encompassed the idea of our lives becoming completely combined, and an emphasis in the future on community.

Here I even created the circles entwining together aswell.
Here I wanted to incorporate hand embroidery and a more traditional way of working. Before working onto willow I experimented on fabric in a very tradtional way.

 I loved making this piece, but it did take most of the week. It reflected both the colours I am most interested in and the movement and spreading of disease.

 It would be good to be able to do this quicker in a digital way using photocopying and photoshop. It has the hand made element but doesn't take the level of effort. Some are definatley going to stay very slow though because that is my whole ethos, and I would like to make some of them into recorded, stop motion pieces.

Drawings of mould

Visiting Gavin really inspired me to work more on my project, but I still had none of my own visual research so I carried on using the textures and blue for inspiration to create more abstract drawings that would inspire my making.

The colous I ended up using are far nicer than the ones I had used before. I love how deep they are. They are meant to be, not just a tentative afterthought. Laying down a thick water colour, then adding water after in splats creates a beautiful looking texture and reflects well the idea of a mould and it growing outwards.

Visiting Microbiology

Before the tutorial on Monday we went to see a PHD student Gavin Bingley in the Microbiology department to discuss whether we could grow our own moulds so that we could use our own images to draw from and get inspiration from.

This is an image of us in Gavin's room collecting our Agar plates.
We then took these and left them in different places for an hour so collect germs and bacteria, then we took them back to be incubated so as to grow mould we could work from ourselves.

I loved doing this. It was so interesting going to a department I hadn't been to before. It was so clinical and clean and white and we had to sterilise our hands and wear lab coats. I love that we have collaborated with a different department and have actually sought out the help we needed ourselves.

Drawings of mould inspired by photo

 From the starting point of that last image of the powdery blue mould, I started drawing the textures and shapes I liked out of it. I found the fluffy and soft aspect interesting, and also this sort of jelly bean shape. The colours were also fun to experiment with, I added a lot more green tones then I could see in the images because they lifted the image.

This image is interesting because I dropped a large quantity of ink onto the paper and then added water and from looking at the photos I have taken of moud the shape fits in really well.

 Here were my forst attempts at adding 3D into the drawings, actually creating a texture out of toilet roll which would also soak up colour amazingly.

This last image shows how I have treid to link the drawings back to my original ones using the spiral element which I feel adds a large part of the movement to the image.

First Mould Drawing From Images

First drawings of microscopic mould found from the internet. At this point we still didn't have our own photos so they had to do to just start making and drawing and getting some ideas of what we want to do next.

This image at the bottom inspired me the most because of the unusual texture, sort of fluffy. Also the colours were so disticnt. This powdery blue which faded into white. The 3D element was also really interesting, and something i would like st start looking at in more detail.

Easter

Been working on my own seperate project looking at mould and growth and natural shapes. I started by taking inspiration from photographs and creating by own drawings from them. These drawings, rather then represent an image of the mould subkect, discuss movement of growth and particular textures which inspire me. I also love the blue colour i managed to find, because when you start looking at nature, a lot of mould is that colour, you just hardly notice it. It doesn't look like it should be natural, but it is!

Willow Samples

After drawing for a while I realsied I really needed to start making! I had made some willow hearts over easter, and I loved thinking them as a way of describing the slow is beautiful idea because it is about entwining seperate lives together. It is a hand made process and is living if left in water it will still grow, but if out of water will dry and createa brown, hard, dead structure.

Lichen, living and growing mould

These images are my starting points of looking at the movemet and textures of lichen and other mould like organisms that are vital for life. I love the amount of different coulurs and textures which can be found in one thing.

These lichens have such similar shapes to mould cultures and show how so many living things in nature reflect this same shape of growing.

This looks like it could be an agar plate, however it is the lichen growing on a grave stone. It is interesting to see the connections between the two.

Beautiful texture I could reflect in drawing and making because it is so small but so detailed and full of beautiful light and shadows. Almost like an elaborate outfit with frills and lace!

Group Meeting

We'd arranged to meet on the Friday morning to talk about our plans over the easter break. Sadly only Steph, Claire, Jess Brown and myself were able to make it, but it has encouraged me to move my own ideas forward and get started on my own personal mini project. We also discussed about the mini project of going over to the science department and using their microscopes with cameras to recieve our own images or microscopic mould growth. This will be really exciting, and i feel for me will my push my own project on really well.