Berlin.

Another great experience this term was Berlin. We went for 4 nights and stayed in a hotel designed by artists where each room had some sort of strange theme. There was the gallery room and many other strange rooms as well as ours the upside down room. All of the furniture was on the ceiling and the beds were in the floor, I won't lie it was an extremely strange experience sleeping with a chair directly above me nailed to the ceiling.

We saw quite a few exhibitions whilst we were there including the Berlin Guggenheim exhibition and the Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition, which included the work of Richard Long and Andy Warhol. I found the whole trip very enjoyable, i didn't particularly enjoy the Guggenheim exhibition as it was just a very large installation by one artist.

I really enjoyed going to see the memorial, I didn't expect something of the scale that it was. I thought it would be quite small. However, the concrete blocks were completely overwhelming and there were so many of them that you just got lost in the middle. I thought it was a really interesting part if the city and although I understand the almost coffin sized, yet tall blocks, I don't quite understand the relation to the holocaust.

Exhibition.

All in all I felt the exhibition went really well. Lots of people came to the opening which was quite exciting as I had never been in that situation before as an artist. If I could do this term gain I would have exhibited somewhere else as well as at Liverpool Academy of Arts as I didn't realize how limited the space given would be. Also, as there was so many taking part we were unable to put the work up ourselves and therefore didn't get the chance to see the work up and alter it before the exhibition date. Although I probably would have liked to do this I felt that the work did look ok in the limited space I had.

This term has been a really good experience for me, it has given me an idea of how it feels to be working alone in the art world. I feel like now i have experienced it I will be more willing to do it alongside my course and perhaps do it as much as I can.

Up and done

Framing.

I now had the issue of how I would get these framed. The pieces are mostly awkward sizes that meant I couldn't buy ready made frames and had to order them individually for each piece. I decided to order them from Rennies and specified that I wasn't going to be using glass. I also specified that i wanted as much of the border of the piece on display as I feel that the edges of the ink and where it has sometimes bled or smudged adds to the work. Without the glass, the texture of the ink and the paper becomes obviously more important and I feel that with the glass this would be something that would perhaps be overlooked.

Layout.

Deciding how to lay this out is something that I know is compromised by the amount of space I actually have. I want to display at least 8 pieces some small and a couple large and ideally would space them out a lot however, I think I have about 2 meters to fit this all in as well as the description of my work.

So.... I've decided to display them sort of "huddled" together and experimented with ways of doing this on the studio floor until I settled on a particular layout.

just before exhibition.

so, i've developed this further. I found something I can really play with and enjoy. The theory of the work comes to me as I'm working through the use of textures and contrasts and simply a lot of experimentation. I decided as the work is about the unexpected textures and layers of ink that can be created I should try making bigger works.

So, with very little time before the exhibition I decided to make some slightly bigger pieces using a plain piece of lino. These worked well also so i picked two to display alongside some of the smaller pieces.

Now....

To buy frames.