Thursday 27 June 2013

Degree show and final project

Well, shows over folks. I am officially no longer a student of Central St Martins School of Art and Design. No more can I say "I'm a ceramic design student". Now I have to say "urm, well I went to art school and now I work crappy office jobs ad-hoc under the delusion that I will save the money I earn and eventually finance my dreams."

I kid, I kid.

The Degree Show ran from Tues 18th to Sun 23rd of June and was honestly the most exhausting period of my life. I feel like I've had a kid here- weeks of build up and tiredness and hard work and now I'm still tired, I just have something that I can show people. This week involved show take-down and then setting up for New Designers. Given that I'm posing for a painting on Sundays, I don't think I've had a day off in at least 3 weeks.

I still look fabulous though.

 That dapper fellow is my classmate Giuseppe Parrinello. Props to us for choosing such a crap backdrop to pose against.

The show went extremely well, with several people telling us that not only was our display the best ceramic show at CSM they'd ever been to, but that it was the best display up across the college in Show Two. Lots of buzz on Twitter!

Of course, because I've been drowning in my final project, I haven't updated this blog in forever, so unless you came here via my show, you probably don't have a clue what it was all about. My collection is called Showdown and consists of a sculpture collection with 4 large handbuilt pieces and accompanying commercial slip-cast pieces. The name comes from the showdown taking place on three different levels:
-my sculpures are characters representing environmental  issues, with 2 villians and 2 victims. This is a showdown between them.
-a showdown between 2 different sides of my ceramic personality- the commercial/accessible world of slip casting and the exclusive fine art side of handbuilding
-at it's core, the showdown is between 2 different aspects of my own personality- my nerdy side with all the love of animation/videogames/action figures/neon and my hippy-dippy grow-you-own-quinoa let's eat vegan brownies side.

Here are the characters:





The Cuter Polluter is a little pollution cloud who hops from place to place causing havok as he goes and leaving a trail of poison in his wake. But he gets away with it because he's so cute! 


The Human Bean is an entity that exists only to eat and breed. Put the right two together and they soon multiply out of control and exhaust whatever resources they are able to access. 


Thaw is an iceberg who's melting much more than he should because of a change in temperature caused by climate change. 


Stumpy is all that's left after a band of rogue loggers tore through her woodland home.

So those are my sculptures which are fairly big in size. For scale, I guess the Human Bean is about the size of a jumbo loaf of tiger bread, or maybe even two taped together. Listen, I don't know measurements. Today I'm so tired I'm not even sure of my own name any more.


My commercial collection are not so huge, Stumpy is about the size of a grapefruit. The idea was that they came in a range of finishes and were blind boxed so the consumer knew which form they were getting but not which finish. This is in reference to vinyl toys, which were a huge inspiration for this project.




All the pieces are for sale (I did sell a couple of slip cast Cuter Polluters at my show), so get in touch if you're interested. I'm hoping to take this lot out to a few exhibitions over the summer, and hopefully send off at least most of the small ones to new homes.

But for now, I'd just like a sleep...