Catherine McCaw-Aldworth

Since starting the second year of university I have tried to get more involved with the university lifestyle. I have started co-running the life drawing society, which I found has helped me a lot in my practice. drawing nude bodies from life weekly has helped a lot in my proportion control and shaping of the body when I have been working with sculpture and drawing in my sketchbook. If you would like to know more about the society you can follow the Instagram page @ucalifedrawingfarnham These are some images of modelling and my work I have produced in some of the sessions.

We had our first show of the year at Arts space Portsmouth. The show is Called Cut-and-Shut and had the amazing opportunity to go and be a part of the set-up team for the show. I am quite interested in curation and so I really enjoyed being able to go and help put up this show and get to know everyone’s work better. My Digital Collage was also chosen to be the artwork for the posters and flyers which is really exciting! The piece that I made for the show was a development from the previous work I have been making so far this year. I continued to develop the fluid painting and trying to evolve the technique to make the texture more gaseous, like that of a surface planet. I also used one of the wax pieces I had made and decided to incorporate this into the piece, merging 2D painting and 3D sculpture to create a multidisciplinary piece. I am quite happy with the piece and how I was able to set it up in the show, although I think that I could be more ambitious with my work ...

I have found researching quite difficult recently as I have been more focused on the practical making side of my course but some works that have really inspired me lately are the ones shown below. They don’t all necessarily link to my work directly but I take little snippets of inspiration from wherever I can. Min Jeong Seo- 'To Live On' 2005 "The stalks these flowers are already dried up but their blossoms are preserved and kept fresh by the medical infusion bags. The life-span of every living creature is  limited.The  infusion bags stand for the progress in medicine and the prolongation of human  life.They  somehow carry an ambivalent message as they refer to both death and life an the same time. Both states are immanent here. To preserve the beauty of the flowers artificially with the help of the infusion bags points out man’s inclination to repress the fact having to die and to postpone death" Antony Gormley  "All bodies are attracted to ...

After Uncensored we got given our new brief called Cut and Shut. This was the opening statement of our brief... “Sometimes we need to make honest and frank acknowledgements about our work in order to refine it, or make it more relevant. Sometimes we need to edit things out, other times we need to bring new elements into play. Sometimes a combination of both is required. It’s about selecting/editing, but most of all it’s about experimenting...” With this in mind I decided to take a look back at my previous work and have a long think about what works, what needed improving and what needed to be cut out completely. After much thought I think that I have decided to keep my context of looking at the female body in comparison and relation to classical Greco-Roman statue/sculpture. Also, to continue experimenting with colour and how this fluid motion interacts with the audience, the colour and motion can also be looked at in contrast to the plain white sculpture. I want ...

We finally revealed Uncensored this week and I can say that It was indeed quite stressful. I struggled quite a lot during this part of the unit, mostly because I had a nasty bit of artist block and just wasn’t able to formulate ideas into physical works. My tutor suggested just cracking on with some collages to get me back into the flow of working and this helped a lot. I was able to produce a few interesting pieces, influenced by classical Greco-Roman statue/sculpture. The results of these were unexpected and quite fluid as I did not plan anything, I just created in the moment, I found this way of working for me very strange but it produced new outcomes I am interested to explore. I also tried working with different materials such as image transfer onto wood and metal. After a few collages I went on to explore more with this and also incorporating paint into them, eventually moving onto canvas pieces, which pro...