Week 17

Day One

Today was the beginning of the cultures project, therefore I started thinking about what two cultures I would base my project one. At first I chose imperial China and the Renaissance era. I used the libraries resources, finding many useful research points. Although once I had looked further into both cultures I felt that renaissance had many similarities to imperial china and as I wanted to combine two conflicting cultures I changed from the renaissance era to focusing on a postmodern culture. I chose postmodernism as I had already quite a lot of knowledge on it and I liked how it could be a playful and funny element to collection. For postmodern culture I looked into pop art, primarily focusing on Andy Warhol. I created a concept board after looking through all of my research.

Day Two

Today I wanted to start making developments off of my concept board. I looked into traditional imperial Chinese fans, I looked at their different shapes. This progressed into working on the stand by taking the fan shape I did this for a while collecting different examples. Although once I finished this I felt that it did not make any substantial development to my work, as I did not know how to progress from this, so I decided to look at the fan shape in a different way. I used the fan shape to create four different looks digitally. I felt that this exercise worked better for me as I then used the fan shape for some collages. I thought that these collages were very interesting as the shape was not confined to the body and was more experimental, and it also linked into postmodernism as it was similar to the Jean Paul Goude photography that I featured in my concept board. This lead me onto producing some quick designs that explored the fan shape.

Day Three

Today I went to the British Museum, as I wanted to gather more research on imperial China. I found a very detailed exhibit that had many different artifacts in it. I noticed how a engraved ivory or jade was a common decoration featured heavily. I thought this made for an interesting aesthetic and it made me think that I could recreate something similar using the laser cutters. I carried on around the exhibit looking at Chinese bottles and vases. I gathered all of my research together and sorted through the most interesting pieces I found in order to use in my work.