Applied Arts Review

 
                            Applied Arts


Week One of Art foundation course at Chesterfield is complete. I began the course with Applied arts, therefore i looked at various artists related to applied arts, got my hands dirty in ceramics and got my metal on in the silversmithing workshop.I also began my 9 week course in Life drawing with Mik godley.

Overall it was a very 'hands on' beginiging to the course, but nevertheless it was enjoyable.
This week allowed me to the leanr many different processes, and introduced me to the idea of art being purposeful as oppose to decorative which i really liked. It was a very interesting explortarty stage within the course but im not sure it would be an area in which i would specialise. For the simple reason that i dont like the process of manipulating metal.

Here is an image of the begining process of my metal box which we had to create during our silvermsithing induction.

Another image of my box as it processed on, on the metal you can see various techniques such as knealling,punching, freelance drilling and burning the metal.

Here is an image of one of the pieces of metals i  did during my induction. I burnt it to take away the titanium casing of the steel. I then used a hand drill to create the pattern by allowing the drill to run freely across the sheet of metal.

As part of the applied arts project i also had to experiment with clay, soe of which where hand buidling techniques such as making pinch pots,slab building , coiling and was shown wheel based work such as throwing.  Here are some images of my pinch pot and coiling.

 During this week, i was introduced to several applied artists, some of which were presented to me by the lecturers, others of which i researched myself.

Whilst focusing on silversmithing, our tudor group did a project on a artist of our choice, of which i choose Vicki Ambery-Smith,an architectural jeweller.Vicki Ambery-Smith's work was very interesting because the concept of architectural jewellery is original and provokes thought around the contrasting idea of something so strong and robust ( e.g. a building) being transformed  into a piece of jewellery which is often seen as temporary and associated with fragility and elegance. This idea in itself creates a very exciting piece of art work.

Other artists that i looked at were ceramicists,including Lesley risley,Simcha even-chen and Judith Davies. All fo which were inspirational in that they displayed work that was simply more than just a bowl, but insterad works of art themselves, which was how i had not envigaged ceramics before.Instead i had seen it simply as a process of creating a functional item, which could be decorated.