Crit Show November 2018

I have been working towards the first crit show of the academic year, at first, I found it quite difficult to think of a piece that was ambitious and that pushed me enough. After many talks with tutors and crit’s I thought about pushing the small-scale circular paintings and wax figurines and make them a lot bigger. I went into the wood workshop and made a large circular MDF board approximately five foot five, the same height as me. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one board big enough to cut out the shape and so I had to use three separate boards and use metal screw attachments to join them together. This meant that the finished board had two lines on it but I was able to cover the smaller line with paint so that it wasn’t too noticeable but the larger line was very visible, something I need to work on a solution for. I have only done small scale circular fluid paintings and so this size was a big leap for me, I tried to use the same method as I do with smaller pieces but it took about three times more paint and I had to use my entire body to hold the board up and be able to turn it so that the paint would mould into each other. In the end I got it to work really well but where it would normally take me about an hour for a smaller piece, it took me almost a full day in the studio to complete, and it was much messier!

The wax figure I was able to easy develop into a larger piece. I was going to make a two-part mould from scratch using silicone and a model but after pricing it up and researching the different risk assessments I would have had to go through I decided to buy a hollowed-out mannequin on eBay. This made my life so much easier when making this piece and I was able to just set up the mould on the wax bench with some support and simply melt and pour the wax in to set. The process was really easy and worked really well, better than I thought!

When it came to set up, I had discussions with my tutor as to how best show my piece and we decided that having it slightly elevated from the ground would be best and so we placed the board on top of bricks to have it off the floor. I developed problems when the weight of the wax figure meant that it was unable to stand by itself in the centre of the piece and so I had to drill into the figure and into the painting to create holes where I could place some metal rods to support it so that it could stand. This is not at all what I had envisioned nor what I wanted but it sparked this debate in my head and gave me a massive brainstorm about future pieces and ideas.

I got some really good feedback from this work during the crit show. Feedback such as; looking more into dystopia and utopia, exploring religion and baptism, linking and working more with assemblage, working with glass, resin, projections, taking away the supports to create a balancing act and much more.