Final Piece and Project Evaluation

In the early stages of this project, I was interested in the way that nature pops up in the human environment no matter how we try to control it; I researched and drew lots of mushroom forms and took my own photos of ones I found out in public areas as well as the garden at home. As I thought more about how nature is an integral part of everyday city life, I looked at the common birds found in urban spaces and the ideology that surrounds them, like the myth that crows and magpies steal shiny objects, leading me to collect bits of metal found on the street for a potential future found-object piece. As I explored the local area of the Lace Market and St Mary's Church, I gathered graphite rubbings of various texts ingrained in the buildings and structures which I then translated into ceramic forms with imprinted words, and patterns depicting lace and windows. As I moved onto the glazing stage, I created a colour palette based on the feathers of rock pigeons - a bird originally living on the cliff-sides and domesticated by humans, now feral and displaced in the city roosting on the sides of shops. 

I looked at how other artists conveyed buildings in their art and the effects of different materials, for instance Rachel Whiteread's concrete house conveyed a very different visual message to Freddie Robins' knitted homes of crime, and I felt that using ceramics would communicate the idea of the hand-made with a sense of humanity and manual work to reference the productivity of the lace market in the past.

The glazes are naturalistic and earthy, with tones of decay and ageing that echo the more neglected parts of the city. The chimney-like block shapes represent the local area's industrial past, a place of fabrication and work, and collectively form a miniature city of their own. After discovering the power of photograms with the ghostly black and white silhouettes, I experimented with stencilling bird shapes and using spray paint to create flat, bold shadows as a backdrop for my buildings. The language of spray paint is urban and the allusion to street-art implies a lower production value to ceramics, the combination of these mediums creates a real contrast that is brought together by the colour palette, the sooty black buildings mirror the matt black paint which is on slightly off-white paper, which I think makes a more natural and muted effect than a bright white background. 

Feedback from my peers was positive and I think the idea of human and animal worlds being intertwined was well received, the birds were described as 'sinister' which I think is good because I talked about the lore of magpies being perceived as unlucky and crows symbolic of death. Another point was that the difference in scale created a sense of the birds holding power over the city, and this reminds me of vultures waiting for their prey to expire so they can descend and consume it, maybe nature is similarly waiting for human life to diminish so they can regenerate and take back the space. All in all I think my final piece was successful in communicating my ideas, I didn't expect anyone to notice the pigeon reference but they still liked the choice of colours before I told them what it meant, I was happy that it provoked thought and that people wanted to touch the buildings and hold them to see all the detail. I think it's a shame that I couldn't include the found objects or mushroom imagery in my final piece but I think it would become too cluttered, so I could use them in a future project.