Category: Digital Residencies

Bella’s Work

Nia’s Work

This experience has given me a chance to work collaboratively for the first time. It was intriguing to learn about each other’s practises and get to use them to create a final work that demonstrates all these skills. I personally enjoyed the chance to reuse previous work and recycle scraps into something new and interesting, showing that you do not need to have brand new materials to create beautiful art. We mainly looked at each other for inspiration during this project, trying to find a common ground that interested us all, with nature being an obvious topic. However when briefly looking at more well known artists, I came across a work I’ve visited in the National Museum Cardiff, a piece by Su Blackwell called ‘Sessile Oak’. This work uses an old Cardiff business directory to create a tree from the pages. This tree appears to be growing from the centre of the book. I felt that this work was a lovely example of what we were trying to do in our collaborative practise, reusing something old or useless and making something beautiful from it.

I would like to thank the Mission Gallery for this wonderful opportunity, my fellow artists for working with me and the Foundation Staff at Swansea Collage of Art for use of their support and use of the studios.

We’d like to thank Mission Gallery/Jane Phillips Award for awarding us this Digital Residency at the end of our Foundation year at Swansea College of Art & Design.

Our brief was to see if we could collaborate in our work through the residency. This wasn’t easy because of our very different approaches and preferred media. So we chose a path that combined some of our existing strengths but took the three of us in a single direction – a process of exploring paper as a medium both in 2D and 3D. We took natural elements as our theme all the way through, and at the end we created a small world of paper!

The discipline of collaboration from an artistic point of view was quite challenging! But we have very much enjoyed this valuable experience.

Thank you for the opportunity,

Seren, Nia and Isabella

Final work put together – the natural world from a paper point of view.

Nia, Seren, Bella

A record of how we used paper in different ways throughout the residency .

Seren/Nia/Bella

We’re starting to bring our paper elements together…

Bella, Nia, Seren

Having made our own paper, lino printed it and paint splattered, we are now working on bending, folding and cutting it to create 3D objects based on organic forms. Not focusing on replicating life forms but seeing where the medium of paper can be taken through colour and manipulation.

Seren

Exploring various creatures and themes in 3D and some sketches, before starting to work out how to use the folded, spattered paper in our final residency week.

This week we have been transforming paper that we painted and made last week. It has been fun trying out some new techniques and experimenting with something different.
Our recycled paper doesn’t like to bend to much as the fibers were still quite big even after all the blending. It was lovely to print onto as it had all the texture.
The painted cartridge paper however really held the form we gave it and so could me more elaborate cuts without the paper crumbling. We were able to make small structures that could bend and fold in their own way which will hopefully come in handy next week.