Jane Grisewood

Visual artist, Jane Grisewood has done a lot of work on journeys and memory so i thought it would be useful to have a look at some of her work. She creates journey drawings similar to the ones i did in class using graphite on paper, noting every part of her journey using tiny scribbles.

"The Line Journey drawings map my passage back and forth between familiar and poignant places. With graphite in one hand against a small piece of paper in the other, intricate networks of lines are made by the shifts of my hand as I walk from place to place, recording movement, duration and distance."[1]

"Grisewood’s practice focuses on time and transience, dislocation and memory and much of her work involves repetition, movement and duration. In her conceptual explorations of time she works with shifts and boundaries between scale, visibility, dark and light, control and chance, inspiring her fascination with the temporal dimension and liminality of space, and the catalyst behind recent art/science collaborations. While working across media, from performance to books, and through a range of processes, drawing is where it starts, whether in inside or outside spaces. For Grisewood, drawing can be with graphite or a camera, and is derived from thought and memory as well as observation – a performative, open-ended process – a moving between."[2]

I really like Grisewood's work because it is so free and although it doesnt have any obvious visual direction it still has a high level of aesthetic value and meaning.

Jane Grisewood has also made some really beautiful artist's books, but the one that stood out most for me from a design perspective was a book she made called "Back Light", which reflects on the experience of observing the annular solar eclipse between 17:31pm and 18:38pm on 20 May 2012 at the McMath-Pierce solar telescope while she was artist-in-residence at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

I really like the concertina format of this book as it turns it into something that flows rather than just consecutive pages.

[1] http://www.janegrisewood.com/Drawings/project2.html
[2] http://www.janegrisewood.com/about.html

All pictures from: http://www.janegrisewood.com/

Cardboard Memory Palace

After studying my memories and journeys I went on to think about where the centre of all my memories lie. It was instantly clear to me that this place was my bedroom. 

In class we had to make a cardboard model of our "memory palace", i started by drawing a plan of my room which helped me remember everything that was in it and where everything was before i started actually making the model.

 Once i made the basic structure of my room i realised it would be impossible to include every  object in my room, so i thought about the ones that were most relevant to me with regards to memories. These were my camera and my record player. I chose my camera because it contains so many memories in pictures, and i chose my record player and records because all the songs i have on vinyl relate to a memory in some way.

Drawing Journeys

In class we had to draw every journey we'd ever taken in our lives on paper using pencil and only lines. This really helped me to think of journeys that i otherwise wouldn't have remembered as well as giving me design related ideas for my artists book. I decided to incorporate small drawings into the "journey lines" to give visual stimulus for the most important journeys.

Drawing Sound

In class we were given 20 minutes to go around college sketching the sounds we heard. I decided to record the journey outside to have a cigarette and back.

I was surprised by how many different sounds there were and some which i never would have noticed had i not been listening out for them.

After our sketching time we had to draw the whole sound journey on a long piece of paper, keeping to a strict colour scheme of black and white. We also had different types of paper to use

After i finished the drawing i still felt there was a lot of sound that had been unaccounted for and was too subtle to represent with drawing, so i ripped two pieces of tracing paper the same length as my paper and layered them to show unidentifiable sounds.

Time Capsule

Following my visit to the Memory Palace exhibition I chose 6 photos and objects that represented significant memories in my life which i would then use to create 6 models made out of simple materials like paper, card, cocktail sticks etc.. and then bury them to be dug up in 2023.

The 6 memories i chose were:

• Going to venice on holiday, 
• Almost falling under a train in France,
• Going to Norwich where my grandparents lived,
• Reading Festival,
• My pet guinea pigs,
• My dad coming back from Spain.

To create a representation of what happened in France i cut a train shape out of paper and drew on the detail, I then put it on a map of france to indicate the location.

Making small objects out of paper was more difficult than I thought it would be as it was quite challenging to fit everything together without making it look messy or accidentally breaking another part of it.

Venice

France

Norwich

Reading 

Guinea Pig

Spain

I decided to bury my time capsule in my local park, I chose this place because i spent a lot of my childhood there and I like to go there to relax as it has nice views and a pond.

front view

 

back view

I buried the time capsule under this tree, its a nice place to sit in the summer and the ground was good for digging.

V&A - Memory Palace

The Memory Palace exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museuem is a collection of 19 works by different artists that illustrates a story using graphic design and 3D form. Each artist was given a passage from Hari Kunzru's book (see outline below)and had the opportunity to interpret it however they wanted. 

"Hari Kunzru's story is set in a future London, hundreds of years after the world’s information infrastructure was wiped out by an immense magnetic storm. Technology and knowledge have been lost, and a dark age prevails. Nature has taken over the ruins of the old city and power has been seized by a group who enforce a life of extreme simplicity on all citizens. Recording, writing, collecting and art are outlawed.

The narrator of the story is in prison. He is accused of being a member of a banned sect, who has revived the ancient ‘art of memory’. They try to remember as much of the past as they can in a future where forgetting has been official policy for generations. The narrator uses his prison cell as his ‘memory palace’, the location for the things he has remembered: corrupted fragments and misunderstood details of things we may recognise from our time. He clings to his belief that without memory, civilisation is doomed."(1) 

(2)

The variety of artists commissioned for the exhibition meant that there was a diverse range of media and form used, however most were graphic design based. For example graphic designer Henning Wagenbreth created a tower made out of wooden blocks (plan above), painted with brightly coloured words and designs. The drawings are in a folk art style. This contrasts with the serious message of the piece which demonstrates the construction of society as well as how culture is formed in subtle ways. 

(3)

Mario Wagner created a collage depicting the magnetic storm in which people are being lifted from the ground and everything is being destroyed. Wagner uses cut outs from vintage magazines and papers. The balaclavas on all the peoples faces and the mainly black and white colour scheme of the piece creates a sinister look while the metal objects scattered around the scene adds a feeling of chaos.

I was really interested by this exhibition as i had never seen anything like it before. The fact that each section was by a different artist demonstrated the contrast in how people see their memories. I noticed that all af them were abstract to some extent, representing how the images in our mind become distorted and fused together over time.

(1)http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/exhibition-sky-arts-ignition-memory-palace/about-the-exhibition/ - accessed 22/09/2013

(2)http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/18657 - accessed 22/09/2013

(3)http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/sites/default/files/wagner_large_0.jpg - accessed 22/09/2013