Chen Shaoxiong

Liliane Lijn

'Fire Ice Poemcon' 2007

'Dark matter Poem drum' 2011

Liliane Lijn is an american born artist who has lived in London since 1966. She was born in 1939. Her parents were jewish-russian and they talked six different languages in their household in Manhattan. This is what she says gave her such an interest in the meaning or loss of meaning in words.

I really recommend reading this interview with Lijn back in 2014. It is very insightful and I found out things I did not know from wikipedia.

A lot of her Pieces also seem to be based around cones and cylinders which is interesting to me because their main surface is wrapped all the way around rather than a top-down circle which simply isn't as exciting.

Faster than birds Poemdrum

Her Poem drums are one of her most famous series which experiment with words and light interacting in a cylindrical fashion. The drums are rotated using motors in their bases. It is this spinning movement that not only adds a dimension of time but reveals hidden depths when the viewer steps up close and peers through the blurred moving letters to discover their reverse on the other side. To me, this feels like a fantastic visual representation of 'reading between the words' in a poem.

In the interview mentioned earlier, Liliane has this to say about the poemdrums: "It started because I had been going to the Science Museum in Paris and I saw a beautiful experiment, which was an experiment in light interference, and I tried to do something similar. I managed to create interference using just lines on cylinders that rotated at a certain speed. And what you’d see, although these lines were black and white, was colour – you’d get colour coming out of it. And then, from that, I thought: “Well, words are made up of letters, and letters are made up of lines, so why not use words?” I thought that might be more interesting.

'Poemdrums' 

I started off just using the alphabet and then I was going to do cut-ups from newspapers, but I had a really good friend in Paris, Nazli Nour, and she asked me to work with her poems. It meant cutting them up because they were very long, but she didn’t mind. I started using words from her poems, and then other people asked me to do it with their poems. It was always a question of whose work would be right, and I did find one person, an American poet I met in Greece, Leonard Marshall, whose poetry was just perfect because they were all very, very short poems. He died very young and the only person who published him was me. A lot of the early pieces were his poems and Nazli’s poems, first on drums and then on cones."

Lijn was Artist in Residence in 2005 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at the Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley,  as part of an ACE, NASA, Leonardo Network International Fellowship.
A residency at NASA... wow! I'd love to do that.

I think that this is my favorite piece by Liliane Lijn. Partially because of the way it's made of transparent glass  and the scientific elements.

This piece is made out of Aerogel; the least dense solid object known to man. It is a fascinating material with weird properties developed for aerospace and spacecraft.

‘If we understand how energy flows, how energy is transferred from one form to another’ says Dr. Andreas Keiling, ‘then we can say that we have understood the phenomena’.
Each scientist looks at the movement and transformation of energy in areas as diverse as waveforms in music and maths, solar flares, the building of a spacecraft, the aurora borealis, the mixing of stellar and laser light and the crustal magnetic fields of Mars. Similarly, Lijn’s multi-facetted practice views the world as flux and energy and this video interweaves her work, in a counterpoint to the scientists’ observations, to create a visual/verbal dialogue between science and art.'

'With all this talk of stardust and lines of light interacting in four dimensions (the fourth being time), it is hard to believe that Lijn’s scientific knowledge is all self-taught. She shrugs this off nonchalantly, however: “That’s all science is, really, observation. I’m just interested in it and so I read.” It seems that a lot of Lijn’s success comes from “just being interested”. Over more biscuits and more tea, we continue to chat.'

I really like Lijn's attitude and approach to her work and her interestedness, especially in science. I feel a very similar way.

The thing that I am making for my project right now is inspired by the rotating movement and interaction with light that a lot of Lijn's pieces do. I also feel like some of her work is an artistic progression of Duchamp and Man Ray's Rotoreliefs which were the initial inspirations for my project.
Above: Stills from Duchamp and Man Ray's 'Anemic Cinema'

A photo of my work in progress. The disk is spinning quickly on a motor and the material is acetate.

                

I have hardly touched the surface on all the things that Liliane is inspired by and has made. She seems very fascinating as does her husband, 'Takis', who I decided to not talk about at all because he isn't relevant to my project.
Overall, I like quite a lot of Lijn's art and find it interesting and see a relevance to my own art.

Artist research: Bill Viola

Bill viola is an influential video artist who helped popularise the use of video in art. He is an international and critically acclaimed artist represented by three different galleries in London, New York and Seoul: www.blainsouthern.com, www.jamescohan.com and www.kukje.org.

There is a great and detailled biography about Bill on the Blain Southern Gallery site: http://www.blainsouthern.com/artists/bill-viola
I recommend reading this, Bill has visited a lot of the world and has a lot of amazing achievements which I find really inspirational.


One thing that I found interesting is that there are no official versions of the films used in his installations online. I feel that this is because these pieces really have to be experienced in-situ and a video just won't do the experience justice. Instead, there are photographs online. Bill Viola doesn't even have a gallery on his website; instead there is one or two images on every single page. There are also one or two images of his work on the gallery's sites linked above. What I find interesting is that every photo is different and definitely doesn't even cover half of what he's done. This comes across as A: a bit mysterious and B: a bit of a treasure hunt.

This piece is titled 'inverted birth'. It definitely makes me think of the ooze and gunge used in body horror films. Dropping different materials and elements on performers then presenting it on a large portrait screen is definitely a trademark of Bill Viola.

'Elements'

Parts of Bill Viola's work really appeal to me-

• Digital and physical being combined, something that I use in my own art quite a bit.
• The 'multidimensionality' of multiple films next to one another. Not only does he use the time dimension but by repeating things over physically next to one another or using each video panel as a window to a different world adds another dimension.
  
• The feeling of experimentation that quite a few of his pieces have, especially his earlier work:

As someone who likes to experiment, especially with video, photography and time, this talks to me.
I'd really like to go and see his show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park: http://www.ysp.co.uk/exhibitions/bill-viola

The theme of our current project is about selecting and remixing as well as communication between art and it's audience.
I think we were suggested Bill Viola because of the way he will frame different things in video panels and they interact in space. This is like the windows and frames to different worlds in David Salle's paintings.


Edit: I found a big digital gallery of his work: http://www.jamescohan.com/artists/bill-viola/1

Summer project- 'Altered book'

Our given summer project theme was 'The altered book' where we had to explore books in any way we wanted. We could make things inspired by our favorite stories or use books as a material or something else entirely.

I went and looked at my collection of books for inspiration. I used to have so many more books but I had to get rid of a lot when I moved house.

I picked out three books I really like. Two of them are about maths and the centre book contains images of machines. This book wasn't what I was really looking for. What I wanted was my books containing great old mechanical engineering illustrations.. sadly I had gotten rid of them last year.

Both of these books mean a lot to me. My dad gave me the 'Polyhedron models' book two years ago. He got the book when he was about my age. 

I have pored over many of the drawings and illustration in these books. They really bring the geometry and concepts alive in my head.

This drawing was inspired by illustrations in this book.

For my project, I decided to make an animation to bring some of these illustrations and graphics to life.
I'm skipping over part of my project here because I don't have any digital images of my mind maps and drawn plans.

For making this animation I started off using an app on an old games console of mine because you can draw straight lines, rub things out and move parts unlike drawing on paper. This is what I made using the app: 

I then copied this, frame by frame to paper:

Then I scanned my 30 frames and put them into photoshop and lined them up.

It took a lot of time to get each of the frames the right size and location to make the animation smooth. I also had to clear-up the other lines around the drawing to make the background plain.
My plan was to then use video-editing software to superimpose this drawing on top of one of my chosen books.

I was really chuffed with how this came out! I could do a series of these but only if I had quite a lot of time... animation is slow and I find that it tests my patience.
In my original plan when I decided I wanted to 'bring the books to life' I planned on making a short film that involved me unwrapping a mystery book and finding that all of the illustrations move. This plan was a bit ambitious for my already busy summer so I trimmed it down to this.
But then I had one final idea to bring the project out of the digital realm and to make it physical: Projectors!

Loui Jover- 'A bigger destiny'

I just came across this piece of art online and feel it's quite relevant to what we're doing at college right now. Over the summer we did a project about books and using them creatively. In our new project it's about combining and overlaying images. This is quite a large scale painting of a train carriage just in shades of black. I like the almost symmetry of the scene and the vanishing point. The man sat in the lower left looks like a warhol of Lou Reed from the back.. that might just be me though. I like the geometric/pattern of shade that the pages of writing add to the painting and the way the grin contrasts with the perspective. Flat vs 3D.

When I looked into the artist, Loui Jover, it turns out that they paint lots of things over pages of books in this way. He mostly paints women which feels quite unimaginative and quite commercial to me:
I like the train painting. The model ones no where near as much but I guess artists need to eat and people like pretty women...

FINAL EVALUATION

'Analyse the requirements and parameters of an art and design project.' To start off my project I took primary research in the form of Photographs, drawings and a couple of notes at the Pitt Rivers and Natural History Museum. Before going, I looked into the range of artifacts they had on show there so that I knew what I’d be more interested in and spend more time looking at those. That was a good idea because we only had two hours in both museums so time was quite limited. It takes me a while to draw sketches so I did end up missing on some of the exhibits.

Magic charms

I documented this trip’s outcome on my blog, presenting photos alongside my sketches with notes.
Looking back now, I think that I did not write nearly enough about the trip and my thoughts from it. Next time, I will try to write a lot more of my thoughts down because I think that I forgot / moved on from quite a lot of the immediate thoughts I had from Pitt Rivers by the time I got round to writing my blog two weeks later. My mind had already started to process and develop my project ideas. I think that I do this too much and hold off from writing things until I have reached the next stage of a project and definitely need to remember to write my immediate thoughts down more. Maybe I need a small ‘thoughts journal’ ?

My chosen theme inspired by the Pitt Rivers Museum was the afterlife. I considered other project ideas such as magic or the way different cultures’ art represent themselves. I decided simply choosing magic would be too simple and that exploring the relationship between culture and art using art would be really quite difficult to visualise. I chose the afterlife because it still seemed challenging for myself because it is literally impossible to imagine but has a rich cultural history. Now that I am close to the end of this project, I can confirm that it has certainly been challenging . With hindsight, magic still could have been a good theme because it is also culturally rich and I am very fond of wizards, energy and superpowers. I will definitely do a project on magic at some point in my life.

Analyse a range of research sources to support an art and design project.

I think that I definitely managed to find a range of sources to research. After writing my project proposal I started to look at religious painting depicting heaven, hell and purgatory, I also looked at John Martin because I knew that some of his paintings were inspired by heaven, hell and the bible. I carried out this research online by googling and following links, then googling some more. Some of our teachers seem quite cynical of this method of research and I understand why; because information can be wrong or falsely given and a written book is curated by a professional author. But where online research lacks in certifiability it doubly has ‘explorability’- one link leads to another which leads to another, research is active and self-led in the direction you’re interested in rather than being confined to the order of information the Author wants to give to you.

When I do research online, I make a Pinterest page and slowly fill it up with images I have found. I think that it is a great way to compile visual research on the fly. I did this for the afterlife project (www.pinterest.com/dominicewan).

But my research wasn’t just online, I took out four hefty books from the college library. All of the books were relevant to my project and definitely contained images that would not be online/I would not come across.
I scanned quite a few pages of the books and kept them on my USB stick. Some of these scans are on my blog.
I then did further research online from some of these books. I found websites dedicated to various ancient cultures including the Romans, Greek and Egyptians.
These websites had pages dedicated to beliefs on the afterlife and were rich in imagery and text which I found very useful and inspiring. I quoted one of these sites on my blog and linked to them. I also added them to my bibliography.

Later on, after talking to a couple of teachers, they gave me various artists to look into including Gustav Dore, who illustrated Dante’s Divine comedy and Damien Hirst’s pieces about death. I did quite a lot of research into Dante’s divine comedy, mostly on a very good website dedicated to it. I read and looked at various artists interpretations of the epic poem. Once again, I saved images from the site to my Pinterest with the intention to write a blog about it. I have not written this blog post yet, though, and definitely need to do it because it inspired part of my work. My problem is that I did so much research that I want to write about but it is so much to write about and on top of that I have to show how it inspired me and give my critical opinion on the work. That is a lot to write and try to evidence.

I posted a blog post using images I’d collected on my Pinterest (http://dominicewan.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/traditional-art-researchthe-destruction.html)  and a blog post purely about research about skulls (http://dominicewan.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/skulls.html) . When I write my blogs, I go out and do further research so that I can provide more information about the images I show but this can inspire me further and then I feel that I need to write another post about that.
It is also hard to cram all the visual research into a blog and to properly do it justice by discussing it all. Quite often I can do research and nothing actually comes of it so it is not relevant to my project.
I’m not entirely sure what I can do to improve this, though. Maybe more written notes could be the answer to my problem here, too?

Interpret research activity to develop ideas and creative proposals

Quite often I will make drawings similar to or inspired by research images and then try to put them next to one another on my blog to show how I interpreted the research. On every single one of my blogposts for this project I have included a research image next to what it inspired:
A pitt River’s skull next to a photograph of my finished ceramic skull; an etching from the 1300s next to my illustrated hell money and some asian hell notes and an oil painting by John martin next to an ink marbling of mine.
I think that this is a good way of showing my inspiration but still doesn’t evidence the full extent of my inspiration well enough.

So to try and display my development of ideas fully, I am currently making a digital collage of my illustrations and work juxtaposed to their inspiration. The ‘Inspiration map’ shows how interconnected my research is and visualises how my work often bridges between multiple points of research inspiration. I am making this inspiration map because of a personal self assessment where I sat down and asked myself how I could evidence my inspiration better. I remembered a moodboard that I made last term which showed how my work interacted with research through colour and thought a variation on that would work well for this project, too. I definitely find things a lot easier when they are visual so visualising my inspiration and work together helps me process and understand it. I struggle with evidencing anyway because a lot of my inspiration and thoughts can be subconscious from all the art I’ve absorbed throughout my life and mentally processed and disseminated already. Inspiration can come from something you’ve seen years ago.

One of my inspirations was the idea of an explorer’s journal but I really struggled to find any images or archives of the diaries of tomb explorers or things like that. This idea still inspired the book that I am making for my final piece but I couldn’t find any relevant visual research. Demonstrate the ability to plan, organise and develop an art and design project

In some of my blogposts, I assess how I feel I have done relative to my time plan that I made at the beginning of this project. I would then discuss what I want to do next in my project to develop it further, here are some examples:

‘I intend on combining these two images next week.’
‘I am considering making some of my own death money to take to the grave’ ‘I think this week has gone well, I feel I've been pursuing research and developing ideas with notes and sketches rather well. Next week I'd like to make a series of ink drawings on marbled paper and I would like to produce some Underworld currency.’

I kept my plan quite vague because I didn’t want to box myself in and wanted to let my research lead my project more than last term but I think that I should have written about this more on my blog. Last term I made a ‘How is it all going’ post all about where I’d come from, and where I felt like taking my project. Ideas are a lot more solid four weeks into a project so maybe writing a plan for the end could direct me more.

Overall, I feel that I planned my time pretty well but could definitely do better. One problem that I’ve found is that simply everything takes longer than you’d ever think. Writing just this self evaluation has taken me hours and thinking takes just as much time.

Apply practical skills and theoretical knowledge and understanding to complete an art and design project within an agreed timeframe. There are three practical skills I’ve used a lot and developed this term; Ink pen illustration, paper marbling and ceramics.
I used the ink pen a lot because quite a lot of my visual research was old ink illustrations and etchings which use cross hatching a lot to display shade/value. I definitely feel more comfortable and competent with an ink pen now after using it for a few weeks and attempting to emulate the style of other illustrators.
I was introduced to paper marbling in the first week because another student was using it and I thought it looked very cool. After trying it a few times I saw the potential the technique had and tried quite a lot of experiments with the technique in colour and style to represent different things. In my work you can see how I use fiery colours in the marbling for hell, very subdued and well mixed for purgatory and bright, contrasting colours swirled about for heaven. I think that the technique feeds into my project well and I discuss this on my blog: ‘The idea of floating about in an unfamiliar place seems quite common and is a recurring feature of near death experiences... I felt that the ambiguous swirling shapes represented the inconceivability of a reality beyond death. The bold, bright colours feel rather dream-like, too.’
Finally, I used ceramics to produce a life size skull. I posted a blog post dedicated to this where I go through the process over the course of five weeks. I also discuss the development of ideas, the adaptation of plans and provide a final evaluation.

Overall, I feel that it was a good idea to mainly just stick to a handful of techniques, it gives your project a good basis, especially when your final outcome is changeable. I would have liked to have done more etching as it is relevant to my research but Thursday was the Ceramics and Printing day and I spent every Thursday in Ceramics. You need more than just 3 hours a week to make something decent in ceramics.

Critically evaluate an art and design project against the agreed requirements and parameters.

In my college feedback, I’ve been told that self evaluation is my weakest point. That is why I’ve tried to write so much on this sheet.
I think the reason I don’t do much of it is because formal written evaluation takes an age to evidence. Real evaluation is when your classmate comes over because they’re bored and you have a chat together about how you feel you’re doing on your project- what’s working and what’s not. I’m constantly doing this either with a mate or in my own head and that kinda makes it difficult to document. This is why a Thought Journal could be good if I remember to get it out and write into it.
I’ve found that I act directly from my thoughts often and don’t like digressing and sitting down to write about something rather than just doing it.
Often when I evaluate myself, I Identify what I need to do more of. The trouble is that it takes time to do more of something. It then takes time to properly evidence what you did and then even more time to assess that and then you have to evidence the  assessment.
Everything takes so much time and for me it’s often typed evaluation that I end up neglecting.

I have not critically evaluated my final outcome against my proposal and plan but intend on making a final overall self review on my blog like Andy has suggested.

Journals, grimoires and spellbooks

Books have inspired me quite a lot this project. I liked the idea of dusty old magic books containing secrets of the afterlife.
Right at the beginning of this project I was reminded of a comic I really liked that was relevant; 'After you die' by artist and comedian, Ramin Nazer.
The book is bright and cartoonish. It illustrates a variety of more surreal concepts of what happens after you die;
 
You can see the rest here. I really like how the artist used the same general layout for each page but customised the typography for each. I feel he visually communicated these concepts very well while maintaining a simple and friendly style.

This comic put the idea of making an illustrated book in my head. I really like the weirder concepts put forward in this book but did not cover any of them in my own project. If I did this project again I'd definitely like to illustrate my own perspective on the concepts put forward here.


The next thought I had from the idea of making a book was inspired by my research into the Romans, Egyptian and other ancient cultures. I thought about explorers' journals- dusty battered books containing sketches of artifacts, maps of foreign lands and notes of ancient tombs- think Indiana Jones.

I didn't manage to find many explorer's journals, possibly because they haven't been scanned in and published online but I did find the diary of Captain Matthew Liddon, part of the 'Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Performed in the Years 1819-20'
I had the idea of Making a fake journal, presenting my art like it was sketches of ancient artifacts and my notes written like I was an explorer in the 19th century. I didn't go through with this but I really liked the idea.

Captain Liddon's Journal of the voyage     >









The last type of books I looked at were Grimoires- magical textbooks which 'typically include instructions on how to create magical objects like talismans and amulets, how to perform magical spells, charms and divination and also how to summon or invoke supernatural entities such as angels, spirits, and demons. In many cases, the books themselves are also believed to be imbued with magical powers'. There are real Grimoires from many different cultures dating all the way back to the Sumerians in 3000 BC. Famous books of magic include The Book of Enoch, The Black Pullet and The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.

Once again, I really liked the idea of making my own Grimoire with illustrations, a made up language and some nice cover art. This has actually been done already by quite a few gothic and occult fantasy authors including H.P. Lovecraft who created the infamous Necronomicon.

The Necronomicon is now a pop-culture book and has been featured in books, films and has been parodied many times. H.R. Giger made his own grotesque version full of mutilated robot angel women and mutated sacrifices. You can find that book in the college library!
I was interested in the meaning of 'Necronomicon' and looked it up. Turns out that it's the words Nekros- Death, Nomos- Name and Ikon- Image merged together meaning 'image of the names of the dead'
I decided to look up relevant words to my project in Latin and Ancient Greek:

I found it very interesting to see how a lot of our English words simply come from Latin.
I used the phrase 'Exanimus Expensum' on the money that I made and wanted to find a name for the book I was going to make. I think that 'Aither Ephemeris', translating to 'Heaven Journal' could be a cool name.

Now that I had a name and quite a lot of inspiration, I actually needed to make this book!
My first thought was to make my own book. My sister has done this before and my friend, Minnie is skilled in book binding too but I decided that that was going to be too time consuming for this project.
So I decided to take an A3 sketchbook I have for college and cut it in half using a bandsaw!
A3 was too big for me and I think that the edges of the sketchbook that were cut look very cool and has frayed the black fabric covering a little.
In my mind, I wanted my book to have a golden design on the cover, like the necronomicon pictured above and I wanted marbled paper edges to tie in with my project.
So I did exactly that!
By dipping the edges of the book in ink, I successfully marbled them, producing a great effect.
A classmate then gave me some of their bronze acrylic. I painted a few demo designs on black paper then just went for it:

I'm very pleased with how this turned out and feel that it looks really interesting. The lack of writing makes people want to look inside and find out what it's about.
Inside, the book is comprised of about 12 sections; Intro page, Imagery, Judgement, Burial, Tombs, Skulls, Currency, Ceremonial skull, Hell, Purgatory, Heaven and Altars.
It contains a lot of my own work alongside photocopies and printed out research images.
I tried to present everything like a journal or scrapbook, pertaining to my earlier research and thoughts.






































The book still has gaps in parts and is missing some things which I would like to do something about but I don't have the time to do that. I made this about a week and a half before the deadline for this project but have reminded myself that I have written all of these blog posts as well as making the money and ceramic skull so I've made quite a lot! That it why I'm not being too harsh on myself over this book.
Overall, though, I am very happy with my outcome. I think I've presented the book nicely and it was almost completely inspired by a variety of research done for the project which I feel I have done justice.