RESEARCH
NICOLA YEOMAN
Nicola Yeoman is an artist who combines typography, photography and sculpture, to create illusional installations. She often uses everyday materials such as white shirts or scissors to create substantial sculptures that from shops such s a circle, or even letters. In her series 'Alphabetical', one of the ones I admire the most is the arrangement of the later E, and this is because of her careful arrangement of the objects, and the contrast between the white and red. Her objects within that installation are also very simple, which doesn't bring away the attention from the actual letter shown. Another work that I particularly like is for the new York Times. This is because she used a translucent white mesh material to create an otherworldly installation within the woods. This worked well because she used a foggy lighting the made the whole work seemed unreal. This is something i would like to take account to into my own work as I want to create something that almost seems like an illusion.
The complex arrangements use well-scoped vantage points and specifically-lit sets that conjure fantastical scenes. She uses both conventional and discarded objects in her work and places these objects in unexpected locations.
Yeoman combines moody lighting and a variety of textures to make her works appear simultaneously flat and three-dimensional. This is especially visible in her letter installations.-http://www.beautifuldecay.com/2014/11/27/nicola-yeomans-thoughtfully-arranged-moody-installations-create-surreal-perspectives/
Red Shift I
Shona Heath
Shona Heath’s perceptively realised flights of fantasy — often achieved in collaboration with photographer Tim Walker — have taken the art of set and prop design to new heights, animating whimsical editorials as well as expertly judged campaigns for brands like Miu Miu (a surreal maritime vignette cast in chocolate box hues) and Dior (an arboreal fairy tale set at Versailles).
Heath’s idiosyncratic way of imagining the world stems from her childhood in the Worcestershire countryside in the West Midlands of England. Although the pastoral surroundings provided plenty of space to dream, her aesthetic is intimately tied to her childhood home, and its contents, the result of her parent’s varied and fervent collection of objets d’art. “My home was quite a modern 1960s building that my father had built and my mother has a very strong aesthetic in everything.
Being resourceful is also a big part of the job. “I wanted golden bulrushes for this Mulberry Harrods window, which we couldn’t find anywhere. We didn’t have money to have them carved. So, it had to be something that we created at the studio. They’re metal rods, a fake frankfurter sausage and the end of a knitting needle on top. I think Ange, my assistant, had already tried filling condoms with some kind of expandafoam!”-https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/creative-class/the-creative-class-shona-heath-set-designer
Shona Heath's work makes me think about using my home as the basis for a set, as my Mother too likes to arrange things symmetrically, and makes it her hobby to decorate our house with Chinese and Western decorations. She also talks about being resourceful and this will also help me when main the set and that I can try to make something to look like its out of a material I want it to be. This will make my ideas extend further because I can think of concepts I can create which may seem impossible
dystopian dream
Dystopian Dream-Shizuka Hariu set designer
One of the key features that stood out to me the most was the innovative set design that worked perfectly with the video projection. One of the main components was the slanted chip foam mat that acted as a stage as well as a slope that the dancers would slide down from. The set designer, Shizuka Hariu, wanted to create a background that would let the dancers interact . This is a small passage from her interview with Sadler Wells;
'She (Hariu) is fascinated by the choreographic style of Honji and Sebastien, which often incorporates aerial work. Attached to wires, the dancers walk on walls and ceilings and propel themselves from surfaces, gliding through the air – a challenge for any designer to accommodate this functionality whilst emphasizing their movements. But the biggest challenge, she revealed, was creating her work in synergy with Nick Hillel’s stunning projection design which helps to evolve the dream-like environment and allows for some clever visual trickery and interaction with the performers. “Nick’s imagery is really fascinating so you don’t want to restrict his visual content by making a set design which is not easy to project onto. The projection mapping is 3D, so he can capture my set in his computer and can project on the outline but also he needs some flat space sometimes so he can show his image clearly.”
Thomas Bird
No Rome-Seventeen
REFLECTION
4/12
For the workshop today, I used a blue slipper and a navy blue silk material which would attempt to compliment the shoe. We first described our chosen shoe and I thought that this slipper would be seen as a domestic necessity, and the worn out edges of the slipper shows that it is something that has been used for a long time. I also noticed that it was made of cotton, an had very simple polka dot patterns which would hopefully contrast the silk material. The silk largely resembled water, and I wanted to interact this with the footwear, so I thought of letting it intertwine with the shoe or burying the slipper until it was camouflaged within the pile of fabric. I wanted to create abstract shapes with the fabric, and did this by using a upside down chair, but I also wanted to see the look it would create if the material was just flowing down from a particular place. I thought of hanging it from the sole of the shoe, using it as a prop rather than just a backdrop. I also poured white paint over the material to create a juxtaposition with the dark, textured silk, and this worked effectively as it also complimented the colours of the slipper. I would like to carry on pouring paint or material of my set for this project as this was the more effective of my trials today.
6/12
After the white show, I went back to the library to do some further research. I found Blommer/Schumm's inspiration of old victorian pictures to be very interesting, and this encouraged me to think about using the past in my work. Originally, I thought of looking back at old Chinese photos. However, because the garment would be related to a family member, I would want it to somehow bring it back to most of them going to London as seeing it as a foreign place to them.
7/12
I am thinking of using a green screen body suit as I don't want to reveal the models face and showcase the garment more. This led me to thinking about the workshop and how I wanted paint to be poured over the furniture, and I think using a second green body would help me achieve this whilst filming the set.
10/12
the green suits arrived, and i quickly tested them with a coat and used my mum as a model to move around. I realised that i have to make the lighting of the set the same throughout filming as this will blend the green body with the background better. I have used green screen before so I understood who to use Keylight on adobe after effects, but it will still quite difficult because i had to make sure I captured the background without the body in it. Furthermore, moving camera footage would be incredibly difficult to manipulate because I would have to duplicate the film or change the position of the background in every frame, so I need to keep this in mind when planning frames for this project.
11/12
After the crit, I am still going ahead with the idea that i have and I bought 80gsm paper rolls to create the wall and the 3d set. However, a problem that this might cause is the thinness of the paper not being able hold up with layers of paint.
15/12
I sketched another plan of the set to scale so that I could copy it down. This made the process much easier as I only needed to make the dimensions ten fold as I drew it on the actual role of paper. I also gave each outline a 5mm-10mm border. It took around two days to complete.
17/12
I did not want to use acrylic paint as it was more expensive, so I decided on using wall paint as it was in larger quantities and therefore I could experiment with colours more. I chose tile red, oriental red and baby pink shades and mixed some of the paints to create the overall background colour of the set. I carried on painting.
19/12
the more difficult part of making the shapes out of paper was the thinness of the material which often creased or didn't hold up as I was trying to put it together. Furthermore, I had to get rid of the spheres as I couldn't figure out how to make it. hopefully in the future i will be able to find out how to create this particular shape .
27/12
i had two people hold up the pink set infront of the white 3d set and started filming. I had th model prepare their steps beforehand and did a couple of test shoots as well as filming the background without anyone in it. I ma quite concerned about the change of lighting when the red set was ripped to reveal the set behind, but I think it won't be as noticeable and adds more to the narrative of the project.
Editing process 29/12 to 3/01
I also took photos during the filming process incase the video didn't work, and i feel that it is interesting to have a contrast between showing a green body and no body at all. The most complicated part of this was connecting the background with the moving image when the model cut a hole in the set, as well as when the camera zoomed out. Sometimes, there are on or two frames that are out of position but it isn't as clear when the video is played at normal speed. I will leave the video on mute unless I decide that adding a sound to i twill be more effective. If i do, i would like it to be either drumming, or similar to noise.
Next time, I would like to try shooting the model without the body suit or even create the set on a larger scale because the bottom of the model was often cut off
Nicola Yeoman
Cildo Meireles
Child Meireles is a conceptual artist who creates complex sculptures to installations that question political events. Many of his work is inspired by the effects of dictatorship of Brazil during the 1960s to 70s. However, through the effective use of'sensorially universal, cerebral and physical elements', he executes universal topics despite being inspired by Brazil's political state in a specific site. 'Eureka/Blindhotland' is an installation that takes place in a spotlit area. It is composed of two hundred black rubber balls which seem identical from a distance. However, as the viewer goes closer to the work, it is videos that each ball is off different weights, from 100grams to 1.5kg. Our optical sense makes it seem that the mass and volume are the same, proving that we have an imbalanced sense of the correction between the two properties. This is particularly interesting to me as I studied physics in AS and this relates to our inability to differentiate the matter of two different objects. Another work that I think will inspire my work this project is 'Red Shift I:Impregnation 1967' .With Red Shift, Meireles takes us into a disorientating all-red world. The first part of this installation is Impregnation, a domestic environment where everything is red, from the clothes in the wardrobe to the contents of the refrigerator. Meireles describes the initial concept for the work as imagining ‘a place in which someone, for some reason – whether due to preference, mania, imposition or circumstance – would accumulate in a given place the greatest possible number of objects in different shades of red.’ This is something to take into account as I want to try making my set design just one or two blocks colour as it may be more effective.
library research
-Cildo Meireles / Paulo Herkenhoff, Gerardo Mosquera, Dan Cameron.
by Mosquera, Gerardo; Cameron, Dan; Herkenhoff, Paulo; Meireles, Cildo, 1948-.
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN a/w rtw 2003, Scanners
In this instance, the most barren of sets -- an ice and rubble-strewn wasteland as seen from above -- only serves to emphasise the opulence and strength of the clothes. These mix tradition with modernity - from fourteenth and fifteenth century samurai armour to Manga cartoons -- as McQueen's displaced travellers journey from Siberia over the Russian tundra, through Tibet before finally reaching the land of the rising sun. If the backdrop serves as a reflection of the instability of our times, the clothes are the ultimate modern-day armour. Over-sized hooded fur-trimmed jackets belted tightly at the waist and worn with voluminous skirts, an A-line metal slatted skirt teamed with 1950s cut wool jacket and black bandage dresses finished with gleaming gold zips. High above the audience a model walks through a wind-tunnel in a white embroidered kimono with a huge, billowing train.
Blommers and Schumm
SC: The practice of set design involves both creative concept planning and also the physical, logistic side of actually making the set. How do you balance those two different demands?
TB: The two are normally kept very separate during the majority of the process. I’ll design beforehand, working with 3D software to create the space or design that I think fits the brief – commercial or editorial. This tends to be the most creative part of the process, researching and experimenting with certain materials. Once a final design is confirmed it’s production mode, organising and planning exactly what needs to be done.
-http://somethingcurated.com/2017/05/19/interview-thomas-bird-set-designer/
In the first part of Blommers and Schumm’s ‘Kidswear’ series, an anonymous figure clothed in a full black body suit holds the child against a dark backdrop. The children model clothing that is bright and spunky, at odds with the shadowy figure in the background. The dark figures are not themselves ominous: in fact, they usually seem to tenderly embrace the child as a mother would. But there is something undeniably unsettling about this act of hiding in plain sight, a feeling which also permeates the Victorian hidden mother photographs.
The first photographic images in the late 1820s had to be exposed for hours in order to capture them on film. Improvements in the technology led to this exposure time being drastically cut down to minutes, then seconds, throughout the 19th century. But in the meantime, the long exposures gave us a few unmistakable Victorian photography conventions, such as the stiff postures and unsmiling faces of people trying to remain perfectly still while their photograph was being taken.