Monday, 22 May 2017
Friday, 19 May 2017
OUIL402: PPP Presentation
I will be using using cues from my iPad so that I know the things I would like to mention during the presentation.
Hi there, I’m Kimberley Burrows of Level 4 and this is my PPP presentation reflecting on my first year of degree and looking on towards the upcoming one - the challenges I’ve faced and will face, my successes, my future prospects at the college and beyond on television and in published works, and my fundraising and volunteering and how that has fed into my strong work ethic and illustrative outcomes. More on that later!
Slide 1: I wanted to start by looking at my strengths and the interesting discoveries I’ve made this year that have impacted positively on my emerging practice.
Slide 2: The final outcome of my Pearly Kings and Queens book in Visual Narratives was something I was really, really proud of. As a research driven module, I was able to look at a variety of research methods from going on trip and having personal first-hand experiences, talking to key figures integral to what I wanted to research and find out, recording audio responses and soundscapes, drawing sound maps, photography, collecting ephemera - all telling a different story to what I would have learned if I’d just researched through websites and books. It became a very personal project because of the emotions and experiences attached to it and I think that really comes through in the final work. Roughs and storyboarding, making multiples and considering different ways to frame and compose the same image, helped to drive forward my understanding of images and how different narratives a told through how the visual is presented. Learning new skills in InDesign - a piece of software I had never used before - combining with photoshop collage and transferring my wide breadth of research into the visual were all challenges but eventual successes and my First reflects that. Contextual research was of high importance influencing and inspiring the aesthetic and tone of voice in my illustrations. Emulating Louise Lockhart, The Printed Peanut, who visited us during this time changed the way I make pictures and gave ma feeling of renewed excitement for picture books. I want to be able to take the foundation of knowledge from this successful module and transfer it to the work I make next year in response to more complex and thorough modules.
Slide 3: Visual Language was successful for me in terms of allowing me to look at my current practice to take apart in a diagnostic fashion - rebuilding it again from the very basics. Particular sessions that inspired me were the line quality, texture and collage sessions - giving me the space to let go of the perfectionist approach I had before of drawing very realistic-looking work which was very representational and had little to do with my own experiences or my own tone of voice. Observational drawing was, as you can image, extremely difficult but this allowed me to have artistic license and learn, personally, the difference between illustration and fine art. I can omit information and keep in the things I see or think are important.This shows my distorted lens, it tells a narrative, and captures an audience much more.
Slide 4: Visual Communication was my most successful module. Both in terms of grade (at 75%) and in terms of learning. As the final module for the year, I really fought to question and challenge my intentions as an illustration and ask myself what work do I want to make and why? What do I want to communicate to someone looking at my work? I chose the opposite to what I would have picked on first glance to get some interesting results which were very professional and very design-based. Totally unexpected of me! I gained many new skills including how to make GIFs in 3 ways, creating vectors in Illustrator, photograms and photography which was totally foreign to me but something I wanted to pursue independently, and vac forms of clay models I made. All embodied a new perspective of seeing and making through the work of architect Zaha Hadid - important to me as a trailblazing woman in the architectural field but also her perception of how forms should work in her deconstructionist and fragmented way. Her own life experiences as a child living in Iraq influenced her to apply interesting ‘skins’ to buildings and looking towards nature for organic forms.
Slide 5: I am very proud of what I have achieved through my studentship this year. As part of the student union as an exec officer, I have helped to shape the events we have at college as well as present a voice for disabled students and provide a platform for equality and accessibility. As student governor I have ensure the students are at the heart of all decision making processes and learned more about an institution I love. And winning student of the Year in November really celebrated the hard work and incredible journey I have had over the past 2 academic years in Access to HE and first year of degree - allowing me to reflect and project forward.
Slide 6: This year hasn’t been without its difficulties, however, both academic and personal. My severe visual impairment means that life is never going to be easy and I have struggled with studio space and obstacles left around such as bags and chairs, accidents I’ve had in my student accommodation, my guide dog having conjunctivitis earlier in the academic year, large class crits being difficult in terms of mobility, people walking into me, leaving feedback on the wrong pieces of paper, not being able to read my own feedback. Context of Practice was difficult for me in terms of group work and often times being alone with Pete spotlighting me and the fact I was alone - making it even more embarrassing and awkward for my peers who clearly don’t want to work with me and that should be respected.
Slide 7: I have surprised myself with some of the discoveries I’ve made this year; from new artists to new reading materials and elements in my personal life. I decided to take up the violin earlier this year, synthesising with my creative flair and my problem solving skills. I’m not able to read sheet music due to low vision but have learned to play by ear and the process of iterating and repeating notes and songs until they are professional sounding - and can then be improvised - marries with that of my illustration process. I have rediscovered my faith which has been a comfort through the rollercoaster of highs and lows, allowing me to keep being charitable, helpful and with a feeling of purpose.
Slide 8: Op-Art is the biggest discovery I have made through a gallery visit where I happened across the work of Victor Vasarely. The strong contrast of black and white, varying frequencies of information and the interlocking shapes create a fascinating but also challenging experience for me and is something i want to learn more about. It begs the question of how we perceive imagery through our different lenses and what is read first. Is there a complex narrative? I want to uncover more next year.
Slide 9: In terms of future prospects, I have a number of things lined up. At the time of writing my presentation I had the Guide Dog Awards to look forward nowhere tami and I had been nominated for the Life Changing Partnership Award. I can now say that we won and just like the student of the year award it feels like such a celebration of all the hard work we put into our partnership and our university life. Tami has truly changed my life for the better and I wouldn’t be here without her. I was very kindly contacted by Davina McCall and ITV for their show ‘This Time Next Year’ where I will be undertaking a year-long journey of publishing my first children’s book - a dream I have had since a little girl where picture books were my only comfort in the months I spent at hospital in London having various operations and procedures. I want to be able to create an accessible book for all going beyond the sense of just sight - through tactile illustrations and Braille, audio CD, a hand-made toy that smells of ginger, and large print and beautiful images for sight children. Why can’t we all have the same book and the same package to enjoy together? I have also been invited to the Loogabraooga festival in October, in Loughborough, to give a seminar and workshop on how to create pictures with limited sight and through that have been out in touch with David Williams, Michael Murpurgo andd Michael Rosen - extending my network of contacts in the professional field.
Slide 10: Fundraising and volunteering really feels into my practice but also my personal life and the sense of helping others facing hardship and tribulation helps me to feel more fulfilled. This then influences the work I make through my personal experiences of giving and receiving compassion. I’ll be visiting Uganda this summer with East African Playgrounds helping to give creative plays sessions to disadvantaged children and teach them the value of play, art and creativity which I am really looking forward to. We are encouraged to take photographs and diaries when we are there but I will be recording a reportage sketchbook of the places I visit and people I meet to have a more unique and personal end result.
Slide 11: Moving onto level 5 and looking toward the future, I have the challenge of combining my new found love for op art with my core love of children’s books. What experiments and processes can I play with and what will be the final outcomes? What discoveries will I make? How can I embed my learning from visual narratives, visual language and visual communication? I will be working on my first children’s book alongside all of this learning which will feed into the end result shown on This Time Next Year. And in COP 2 I wanted to look more contextually at the relationship between shapes through Gestalt theory, analysing framing, grounding and out personal experiences and how those things affects the imagery we see.
Thank you for listening. Any questions!
Slide 1: I wanted to start by looking at my strengths and the interesting discoveries I’ve made this year that have impacted positively on my emerging practice.
• Making a picture book in the Visual Narratives module
• Letting go of my perfectionist mentality in Visual Language and adopting a bigger sense of playfulness, quirkiness and charm reflecting my personality and developing my own individual tone of voice
• Trying new things in Visual Communication, purposely going against what I originally would have picked for a music piece and for a person of note and challenging myself with new things to push myself and my outcomes, exhaustive blogging reflecting on my own work, the thought process and crafting process and analysing contextually and visually to better understand my practice and the practice of others
• My strong sense of studentship
Slide 2: The final outcome of my Pearly Kings and Queens book in Visual Narratives was something I was really, really proud of. As a research driven module, I was able to look at a variety of research methods from going on trip and having personal first-hand experiences, talking to key figures integral to what I wanted to research and find out, recording audio responses and soundscapes, drawing sound maps, photography, collecting ephemera - all telling a different story to what I would have learned if I’d just researched through websites and books. It became a very personal project because of the emotions and experiences attached to it and I think that really comes through in the final work. Roughs and storyboarding, making multiples and considering different ways to frame and compose the same image, helped to drive forward my understanding of images and how different narratives a told through how the visual is presented. Learning new skills in InDesign - a piece of software I had never used before - combining with photoshop collage and transferring my wide breadth of research into the visual were all challenges but eventual successes and my First reflects that. Contextual research was of high importance influencing and inspiring the aesthetic and tone of voice in my illustrations. Emulating Louise Lockhart, The Printed Peanut, who visited us during this time changed the way I make pictures and gave ma feeling of renewed excitement for picture books. I want to be able to take the foundation of knowledge from this successful module and transfer it to the work I make next year in response to more complex and thorough modules.
Slide 3: Visual Language was successful for me in terms of allowing me to look at my current practice to take apart in a diagnostic fashion - rebuilding it again from the very basics. Particular sessions that inspired me were the line quality, texture and collage sessions - giving me the space to let go of the perfectionist approach I had before of drawing very realistic-looking work which was very representational and had little to do with my own experiences or my own tone of voice. Observational drawing was, as you can image, extremely difficult but this allowed me to have artistic license and learn, personally, the difference between illustration and fine art. I can omit information and keep in the things I see or think are important.This shows my distorted lens, it tells a narrative, and captures an audience much more.
Slide 4: Visual Communication was my most successful module. Both in terms of grade (at 75%) and in terms of learning. As the final module for the year, I really fought to question and challenge my intentions as an illustration and ask myself what work do I want to make and why? What do I want to communicate to someone looking at my work? I chose the opposite to what I would have picked on first glance to get some interesting results which were very professional and very design-based. Totally unexpected of me! I gained many new skills including how to make GIFs in 3 ways, creating vectors in Illustrator, photograms and photography which was totally foreign to me but something I wanted to pursue independently, and vac forms of clay models I made. All embodied a new perspective of seeing and making through the work of architect Zaha Hadid - important to me as a trailblazing woman in the architectural field but also her perception of how forms should work in her deconstructionist and fragmented way. Her own life experiences as a child living in Iraq influenced her to apply interesting ‘skins’ to buildings and looking towards nature for organic forms.
Slide 5: I am very proud of what I have achieved through my studentship this year. As part of the student union as an exec officer, I have helped to shape the events we have at college as well as present a voice for disabled students and provide a platform for equality and accessibility. As student governor I have ensure the students are at the heart of all decision making processes and learned more about an institution I love. And winning student of the Year in November really celebrated the hard work and incredible journey I have had over the past 2 academic years in Access to HE and first year of degree - allowing me to reflect and project forward.
Slide 6: This year hasn’t been without its difficulties, however, both academic and personal. My severe visual impairment means that life is never going to be easy and I have struggled with studio space and obstacles left around such as bags and chairs, accidents I’ve had in my student accommodation, my guide dog having conjunctivitis earlier in the academic year, large class crits being difficult in terms of mobility, people walking into me, leaving feedback on the wrong pieces of paper, not being able to read my own feedback. Context of Practice was difficult for me in terms of group work and often times being alone with Pete spotlighting me and the fact I was alone - making it even more embarrassing and awkward for my peers who clearly don’t want to work with me and that should be respected.
Slide 7: I have surprised myself with some of the discoveries I’ve made this year; from new artists to new reading materials and elements in my personal life. I decided to take up the violin earlier this year, synthesising with my creative flair and my problem solving skills. I’m not able to read sheet music due to low vision but have learned to play by ear and the process of iterating and repeating notes and songs until they are professional sounding - and can then be improvised - marries with that of my illustration process. I have rediscovered my faith which has been a comfort through the rollercoaster of highs and lows, allowing me to keep being charitable, helpful and with a feeling of purpose.
Slide 8: Op-Art is the biggest discovery I have made through a gallery visit where I happened across the work of Victor Vasarely. The strong contrast of black and white, varying frequencies of information and the interlocking shapes create a fascinating but also challenging experience for me and is something i want to learn more about. It begs the question of how we perceive imagery through our different lenses and what is read first. Is there a complex narrative? I want to uncover more next year.
Slide 9: In terms of future prospects, I have a number of things lined up. At the time of writing my presentation I had the Guide Dog Awards to look forward nowhere tami and I had been nominated for the Life Changing Partnership Award. I can now say that we won and just like the student of the year award it feels like such a celebration of all the hard work we put into our partnership and our university life. Tami has truly changed my life for the better and I wouldn’t be here without her. I was very kindly contacted by Davina McCall and ITV for their show ‘This Time Next Year’ where I will be undertaking a year-long journey of publishing my first children’s book - a dream I have had since a little girl where picture books were my only comfort in the months I spent at hospital in London having various operations and procedures. I want to be able to create an accessible book for all going beyond the sense of just sight - through tactile illustrations and Braille, audio CD, a hand-made toy that smells of ginger, and large print and beautiful images for sight children. Why can’t we all have the same book and the same package to enjoy together? I have also been invited to the Loogabraooga festival in October, in Loughborough, to give a seminar and workshop on how to create pictures with limited sight and through that have been out in touch with David Williams, Michael Murpurgo andd Michael Rosen - extending my network of contacts in the professional field.
Slide 10: Fundraising and volunteering really feels into my practice but also my personal life and the sense of helping others facing hardship and tribulation helps me to feel more fulfilled. This then influences the work I make through my personal experiences of giving and receiving compassion. I’ll be visiting Uganda this summer with East African Playgrounds helping to give creative plays sessions to disadvantaged children and teach them the value of play, art and creativity which I am really looking forward to. We are encouraged to take photographs and diaries when we are there but I will be recording a reportage sketchbook of the places I visit and people I meet to have a more unique and personal end result.
Slide 11: Moving onto level 5 and looking toward the future, I have the challenge of combining my new found love for op art with my core love of children’s books. What experiments and processes can I play with and what will be the final outcomes? What discoveries will I make? How can I embed my learning from visual narratives, visual language and visual communication? I will be working on my first children’s book alongside all of this learning which will feed into the end result shown on This Time Next Year. And in COP 2 I wanted to look more contextually at the relationship between shapes through Gestalt theory, analysing framing, grounding and out personal experiences and how those things affects the imagery we see.
Thank you for listening. Any questions!
My presentation clocks in at 8 minutes and 30 seconds! Again, this is just a possible outcome but I'm glad it fits within the time limit somewhat and that there is plenty of room for improv and additional thoughts and comments on the day with a window of time leeway on either side of the 8 minute mark.
Now I'm itching to get this presented!
Now I'm itching to get this presented!
Guide Dog Awards 2017
Well, I feel truly humbled and honoured! Tami and I won the Life Changing Partnership Award at Wednesday night's ceremony and I just simply cannot believe it! We have come so far this year and this is such a celebration of everything we have achieved together in our 2 and a half years of partnership. It was wonderful to be able to finally hear what Matt and Simone said about me during the filming in February! Thank you so much for the kind words, guys! :) Such a wonderful event with lots of incredible dogs who change lives every day, and full of inspirational Guide Dog owners who I can proudly call my friends.
I just feel so happy, so blessed with the gift that is Tami and so motivated to keep going in my journey!
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
OUIL402: Tutorial
Today I had my final tutorial with my tutor which was very bittersweet! We discussed the end of the year, my presentation ideas and my final A2 poster.
Here are things for me to consider:
• Picture books - context
• Visual language - letting go
• Research - real life experiences
• Intent
• Authenticity and voice
• Challenging and surprising myself
• Contextual research of other practitioners
• Criticality
• Op Art, colour theory, gestalt theory and how to marry that with children's books
• New ways of seeing
• Value of studying Zaha Hadid
• Next year: Davina McCall and This Time Next Year
• Uganda trip with East African Playgrounds
• Loogabarooga festival in October
• talk about success
• Focus more on the future - what excites me, successes in current work and what can be taken forward
• See beyond signs and symbols to more non-representational work
• Scrapes of grey and black are successful in being suggestive in my poster