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.