Update I’M OFFICIALLY IN OXFORD!!!! LOVING THE CITY WITH EACH DAY THAT PASSES. So it’s now officially 1 month since I started studying Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University. I’ve been a bit busy with projects but decided to update my blog as I always try to. To break the ice and to get us started on our art journey (again) we were put in pairs, in which we each had to come up with ideas and presenting them as the weeks go by. I have to say I’m quite lucky to be working with the guy I’m currently working with. He’s Tom James-Brown an up-coming (I feel so anyway) Welsh artist who deals mainly in sculpture and installation. We have had some crazy adventures already and I’m beginning to  notice a more playful side to my art work; he does things when ever he feels inspired so our projects have often involved very quick sessions of practical work but through deep discussions.

So for one of our weeks we had a drawing exercise discovering various methods of drawing with our definition of a drawing simply being a means of communication, after that we were set our usual group work and were given free reign to determine what we were going to draw. Now of course this was too broad as we were basically told WE COULD DO ANYTHING WE WANTED! So after a short dialogue with Tom we decided to do an interpretation of each other’s chosen memory. He had to draw a memory of me being in the middle of a blackout in Botswana and a child fearing the stairs as they where to dark to go down. His chosen memory for me to interpret was when he was stuck in Croatia having missed his flight being left stranded with no funds at the time.

Now I had great difficulty at first as I couldn’t really put myself in Croatia, so I thought of what I could have done in that situation based on the subject of ‘Sanctuary’. I googled (as you do) images of Croatia and was fell immediately in love with St James Cathedral in Sibenik which features both Renaissance and Gothic architecture. I knew I had to do something based on this cathedral so decided to make my interpretation of the distinctive dome on the cathedral (bearing in mind the the ‘drawing’ is simply communication of an idea). there was a lot of trial and error which I’ll try and post in order, but the end result looked quite dark and scary WHICH WAS AWESOME as that’s what we were aiming for. the end result was an installation with my dome on top and a T.V. Tom brought back from Wales that was broken and would fizzle to a black static visual experience which gave the viewers an uneasy feeling (which was AWESOME). My dome (not really a dome as it was so badly made BUT WHO CARES I HAD A WEEK and I claim artistic License) was made from an edited skeleton structure made from wood rods and bin bags held together with staples.