Initial ideas and workshop progress

I had a group tutorial on the 14^th of October and by listening to everyone else’s ideas and also through talking through my thoughts out loud I discovered that I was trying to focus on too many ideas and needed to narrow them down to just one. Kirsteen asked me to think about which element of the industrial revolution it was that interested me the most and I decided that it was the feeling and atmosphere of the time that you got a strong sense of from old photographs I had found and also in Lowry’s paintings.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0YrB8uNZRExcYp9AqXBtPvf3sRBkXmDjUzWCTXZ7eY2DNqui5GM8g-5DsedEsLc6vpHdQ3kYKcNvBZLE5ZKU6G2PF-ruVBJ3m4g0fxlt1pcBj71XGmQ4CTveyJSUOTD0eKWYOsKwe3Eg/s640/Cotton_Mill-India.jpg

http://www.lan-opc.org.uk/Atherton/images/Atherton1950Montage.jpg

http://theredeyeportal.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/cotton_town430x300.jpg

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/T/T00/T00111_10.jpg

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/04/16/article-1377633-030832E0000005DC-634_634x521.jpg

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/N/N06/N06032_10.jpg

I like how Lowry utilises colour in his work to portray the dreary and smoggy conditions that the people of Manchester had to live in at this time. I also really like the grand scale of the factories that towered over the workers houses and the feeling of foreboding they induced. I feel I am also fascinated with life at the time of the industrial revolution as I have never experienced life like the workers did.

We then had a morning of ideas generation where we had to draw our initial designs. I found this very useful as it made me:

• Focus on what it was I actually wanted to produce.
• I’m planning to create vessels of a chimney like structure that will have images of buildings from the industrial revolution on their surface. 
• I want to create a series of these chimneys that will tower over one another and create almost a small town of their own.
• I am planning to explore how I can use texture and colour on these vessels to induce a feeling of the industrial revolution.
• I want to experiment with melting metal onto the surface of these vessels to create more texture and a tar like effect.
• I would like to use sgraffito to transfer the images onto my pots as I did some drawings of the pictures I had collected and what I liked most about my drawings was the quality and density of built up lines and I wanted to transfer this line quality onto my vessels.
• Therefore this week in the workshops I am going to test out the melting points of certain metals in the kiln.
• I am going to explore combining certain materials such as seeds in the clay to create more texture to give my pots a more brick like quality. 
• I am planning to try using sgraffito to transfer my images onto clay.

Here are a few pictures of scenes I have drawn of images from the industrial revolution.