Blah blah

Magazine cover for a personal publication called 'Cut And Paste' focusing on on sustainability, crafts with a hand made aesthetic.

Tea Party

Three exhibition pieces based on Alice in Wonderland. Each image depicts a scene from the first chapter of the book by Lewis Caroll.

One pill makes you larger and one makes you small

This is my finished animation telling the first chapter of Alice In Wonderland. I went gung-ho with the handwritten aesthetic vibe and the whole piece was animated using stop motion onto a 20 metre roll of paper hand written inch by inch by yours truly!

Read more books kids.

Stage 2

Don't blush when I cut you open

Mass crazed clear out ensued last night. I believe most people call it procrastination. I threw masses of shit away, I didn't realise I owned so much useless crap. I did come across many many old magazines that I remember i purposely kept because I'm an image hoarder. I heart eye candy. I admit it! If it looks good, put in a corner/box/drawer/shelve, because I will need it at some point....if I can ever find it. The saddest day of my university career was when 5 of my Face magazines we're cruelly stolen from my studio space, I don't know how I ever recovered to be completely honest. Magazines are my literature and I'm not afraid to admit it. Lula, Dazed and Confused, Nylon, ID, WAD, Grafik...oh the list is endless. My love for The Face will reign FOR ALL TIME....but thats another post all together.

So I found an old issue of Elle that I'd nabbed from my sister that had some amazing images of Courtney Love, I thought I'd lost it but alas there it was! Above is the first stages of what I'm creating with those images. The photograph is very baaaaaad quality but I reckon with a wee bit of tweaking this could work out to be a good image for my magazine cover.

When I was 17 I had wrists like steel and I felt complete.

Today was spent almost entirely indoors, the combination of too much tea and central heating sent me to new heights of noggin pain and fuzzyness I never thought possible. I went for a walk, a tutor of mine always used to say that inspiration could come from anywhere..'go look for something new'. I have lived in the same house since I was born apart from living in Manchester for four years of course, I have always come back here, to this house, to Preston all my life. How would I be able to see anything new? I walked past my old school, walked a few streets I hadn't set foot down in years but they still looked pretty much the same, perhaps only smaller. I have never thought to photograph my neighbourhood, maybe because I've seen it so many times, I'm blind to it's features. I started to think about documenting those streets though, and how to go about doing it as I stomped around. After 23 years of living in one place, everywhere has a story or a memory. This statement is of course obvious but the challenge of documenting these streets in a graphic yet personal way is something I have begun to be intrigued by.

I was also brought back to Jonathon Barnbrooks work today, (http://www.barnbrook.net/) I've been looking into font design and remember from the lecture I attended on his work last year that the thing that impressed me was his typography. I have a love/hate relationship with Barnbrooks work, but I find I love his typography work, mostly because of his ability to talk so enthusiastically about it. I found a font called 'Home Sweet Home', I love it. So this combined with my thoughts of home lead me to knock up a strongly typographical piece of work to encapsulate my project idea of the day.

Ron Mueck

Ron Mueck//Manchester City Gallery//Artist Rooms//16/02/10.

I've been a fan of Muecks work for only a short time but his pieces made a instant and lasting impression on me. I don't know a great deal about his background which isn't a result of lazyness on my part but I swear! I always feel that when I know too much about an artists background or read other peoples views on an artist you feel an affinity with, it can hinder rather than support your ideas about their work. The artist rooms in the city gallery only house a few select pieces by the chosen artist in Ron Muecks case it these were Wild Man 2005, Spooning Couple 2005, and Mask III 2005. The piece that struck me was 'Spooning Couple', whereas the shear scale of 'Wild Man' was undoubtably impressive the miniaturisation of figures while retaining such a sense of realism to and almost hyper-real state captivated me. To see the the sculpture in the flesh brought a new level of appreciation and a different dimension of meaning to the piece. Before I had seen his work in reality I associated many of his pieces with the theories connected with the uncanny and the abject. In particular his piece 'Dead Dad', which is a sculpture of his fathers corpse. The piece causes an inner dilemma, it is in essence the replica of a human corpse and our initial reaction is to be repulsed because we are being forced to deal with something that is no longer of this world. The topic of his work had once been a subject and more empathy is created because from the title we realise it was the artists father. Now this human being has become an object we are confronting a replica of a corpse which is a representation of something that was once alive but now isn't. As we confront this we become aware of our own mortality.

With 'Spooning Couple' I was aware of the workmanship that went into such a piece, the realism of it it was amazing. This realism caused a great sense of cognitive dissonance in me. The piece was set low down so you had to stoop down to observe it properly, this along with the way the sculpture was depicting a private moment made me feel like a voyeur.

This beautiful island we call Britain

First in a series of images that illustrate Great britain. I want to use traditional British iconography but present these elements in a new way to try and move away from the tired representations of the country. I want my final images to have elements within them that celebrate the stereotypical imagery associated with Great Britain so they are identifiable but using elements of collage and using strong colour to bring these representations up to date. I'm just playing with ideas at the moment, so it's a bit rough around the edges.

Yeah!

We are all in the gutter,

but some of us are looking at the stars.

design

art

fashion

music

photography

inspiration

and whatever the fuck I want.