Stephen Farrell Workshop 2

2nd night’s homework involved diagramming a narrative map of your fable and then using it to help graft your final piece. I made up a “This Big” fishing story that closely follows the architectural map of the Little Red Hen story. The piece above that is the final, where I tried to define some basic fishing terminology and use the illustrations to tell the story of my fable. I love the gesture of casting in fly fishing and I used the line work in that one to mimic the gesture. I wanted each word to flow easily into the next. It’s very abstract and different from how I’m used to thinking about my work. That’s good, even if the work itself is a little confusing.

Stephen Farrell Workshop

Another visiting artist came last weekend for a 3-day workshop in our studio. Stephen Farrell has created a way of working he calls graft, or grafting. By taking two very different subjects and combining them (or grafting one onto another), you can get some really interesting results. We each chose a fable and a broad knowledge domain, such as dentistry, bowling, botany. My group chose fishing. We were to take the broad fishing domain and tell the story of our fable using only language from the fishing domain. Sounds very confusing, but we had a whole weekend of exercises leading up to the final. It was an intense weekend, but I really enjoyed experiencing another totally different process.

The work above is from our exercises. We exchanged fables and I got The Little Red Hen. Our first exercise was to graphically illustrate the combination of our domain and a sentence from our fable. I used a diagram of the sound waves from a fish locator and attempted to illustrate some of the repetitive nature of the dialogue in the fable, showing the animals who consistently say “Not I” and the one hen who says “I will”. The second image is of the hen scratchings from the beginning of the fable and the river current markings on maps that help fisherman know where to fish.

Laurie Rosenwald Workshop

Laurie Rosenwald spent a weekend in our grad studio and gave a workshop called “Making Mistakes on Purpose.” The idea was to think less, get away from the computer, let go a little, and perhaps create something surprising and new. The first day, we each had a large pad of paper and some messy mark making tools like paint, crayons, markers, ink, etc. She shouted a word, such as skeleton, and we drew it in seconds. She shouted another word, and we drew that. We did this for hours. The next day, we scanned our images into flickr and drew from that image bank to make very fast design work. She said design a postcard and we grabbed someone’s random image, added some type and tada, postcard! This was a really fun way of exploring another process of working. The last thing we did was make a book in 8 minutes. Mine is about a skeleton who plays the drums, tried being a hippie once, and likes girls who dance to his beats.

Collage

This is from an exercise we did in letterpress class as a way to free us up a bit. We each took part of the city paper from Austin, TX and one from Baltimore and combined them into a postcard-sized collage. The intent was to print all of ours into a small book, but we never got around to it before the semester ended. I hope to print them this spring so we can all have copies of each of ours.

Xerox Book

I have a huge collection of photographs of my family at the dinner table. For whatever reason, this is when my family decides to take pictures. I probably have more photos of us around dinner tables than any other event in our lives. Every birthday, holiday, and celebration is documented around the table. I xeroxed as many as I could find and connected them all together into one long accordian book.

Flip Book

I made a small flip book about my grandmother’s name, which is quite long. The text reads: “My Grandmother’s name is Pauline Louise Anderson Johnson Halling. But her friends call her P. Louise”. I added a couple of old photos and circled my grandmother to identify her among her friends. I started making the book in Flash to get the pacing and animation down and then printed out the frames. I really like how the finished book looks like an old home movie when it’s flipped.

Accordian Map Book

A 5-color screenprint of directions and a map from my home in Baltimore to my parent’s house in Silver Spring. The trip there is one side, the return on the other. The twisting shape of the book mirrors my totally distorted sense of direction.

Sentence Diagram

I recently got the book Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, by Kitty Burns Florey. It’s a great book about the lost art of diagramming sentences. I letterpressed the quote, “I do not know anything more interesting than diagramming sentences,” by Gertrude Stein. I, of course, had to enlist my sixth grade English teacher to help me with the diagramming. It was funny to find out she also had the book, as we both spent some time trying to figure out this surprisingly complicated sentence. I letterpressed the black and then hand-painted the circles with watercolor.

Recipes on Plexi

I screenprinted recipes on index card-sized plexiglass. I screenprinted the back in one flat color and type on the top in 2 colors. I was experimenting with alternative surfaces and transparency as well as making some cool waterproof recipe cards. The laser cutter at MICA rounded the edges nicely. The surface is still delicate, so I worry about scratches on the ink.

Urban Forest Banner

The Urban Forest Project was an outdoor exhibition of banners created by local designers. It started in New York and was in Baltimore in spring 2008. Banners hung in several neighborhoods throughout Baltimore, promoting a healthier environment. Afterwards, they were recycled into bags and buttons and sold. Mine hung on Pratt street, right near this lovely Watch for Bikes sign. The project was presented by Tilt Studios, see the blog here.