Overall Comments
This
final assignment demonstrates a steady development in your technical and visual
skills over the five assignments. You are now able to make more considered
choices in terms of the selection of materials, techniques and processes and
your visual awareness and compositional abilities have become more acute. You
have recognized the need to focus your thinking more clearly on the task in
hand and this has resulted in significant progress in relation to a more
creative development of ideas from starting point to final outcome. As your
confidence grows, I think you will feel more assured about taking risks with
your work. Your
logbook and reflections on your progress and assignment outcomes show me that
you have become increasingly able to make pertinent observations about your own
work and that of others. You
have made very steady progress throughout the course and a key development is
your willingness to take a more open minded and enquiring approach to your
work. Congratulations on the successful completion of the course, Donna.
Feedback on Assignment: Demonstration of Technical and Visual Skills, Quality of
Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity
Stage 2: Focusing on a
Theme: Funghi
Although it took you a
little while to narrow down your choices, I think that you undertook some
valuable research in order to arrive at your final decision. You
produced a competent documentation of your ideas and visual stimulus in your
theme book and justified why you changed your focus over the course of
completing this final assignment. I felt in this respect that the theme book
was a truer reflection of your learning than the final outcome. There was evidence of your ability to
identify some strong starting points and to use sampling to good effect in
order to make decisions about what might work or otherwise. I do hope that now
the course has finished, you find time to return to some of your initial ideas
and take them further. For example, the pottery shards have great potential.
You might like to look at Japanese Boro textiles This might give you some
further ideas in terms of piecing cloth together as in your random patchwork
sample.
Stage 3: Developing a Design
There
was some good experimentation and sampling here which showed the extent to
which you have internalized and applied learning from previous assignments; the
tearing and slashing, pleating and folding being a good example of this. I
liked the way you attempted to contrast surface textures by your choice of
fabrics and I think that you could have taken this further with reference to your
photos of fungi against tree bark for example where you had different surface
levels as well as textures. I also thought that the distorted fluted curves of
the fungi in the photo were something worth taking on board. You made some good links
through to costume and fashion with your folding, gathering and pleating
samples. Think carefully about your choice of fabric though. The taffeta and
chiffon although attractive in terms of surface, are not the easiest of fabrics
to manipulate in this way as they tend to be stiff and unyielding. Experimentation with black
thread and soluble fabric picked up on the strong linear qualities of your pen
and ink drawings. Is this something you might take further in the future? There
was a delicate and fragile feel to this sample.
Stage 4: Making a Textile
Piece
Your choice of embellishing
to bond your fabrics together worked well, although I also liked your earlier
sample where you folded the fabric in layers. In most of your sampling, you showed
good understanding and use of colour and there were close comparisons with some
of your earlier drawings and imagery. I felt that your final piece could maybe have
been developed further and perhaps the choice of a bag limited you somewhat in
terms of scale. For example, what might you have considered in terms of further
surface manipulation if the piece had been larger and flat, rather than folded
into the small bag shape? Could you have begun to
distort your layers as in the fungi photos to give a fluted, curved effect?
Could you have varied the height of the layers? Could you have combined with the
layering and slashing technique that worked so well in your sample? Did you
notice how when you moved the stitched lines closer together, the frayed effect
of the layers increased proportionately? How might this have enhanced the
fraying of the scrim? Another approach might have been to produce three smaller
linked pieces where you varied the surface height from almost flat through to
raised. You could also have allowed the surface manipulation to extend right to
the edges of the piece and become an integral part of the design rather than
trimming or stitching. By pushing your exploration
of surface to its limit, this would then have been the main focus of the piece,
rather than the functional element. A final question is whether you needed to
further embellish with sequins? Did you really need them? Can you justify them
in terms of your deign source?
Sketchbooks - Demonstration of Technical and Visual Skills, Demonstration of
Creativity
You have become increasingly confident in the use of drawing as a means
of recording your observations and ideas. Please try and maintain this approach
as it is certainly strengthening your design work. You have also recognized the
value of using your sketchbook for different purposes e.g. to explore design
possibilities, to link ideas from other sources etc.
Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical Essays - Context
For me a key area of your development is your willingness to undertake
experimentation in the interests of developing your creativity. Your review
also indicates that you have gained a great deal of personal insight and
self-awareness of the ways in which you work and you have discovered what
motivates and excites you. This is the first step to finding a more personal
style of working. For the future, try to maintain gallery visits and reviewing
artists’ work. This will strengthen the knowledge and understanding of the
wider context of your own practice. Your review indicates how much you have enjoyed the
course. It has been a pleasure to tutor you Donna. Best wishes for the future
