For the first day of the 3DCP rotation, we were told to reflect on our memories and the presents we have received on all our past birthdays. This made us use personal experiences to help shape the individuality of our work, like many artists, such as Sophi Calle.
We were first told to roughly write down all the presents we could remember receiving each birthday, I found this difficult as I found I couldn't recall many of my gifts except for recent ones.
We then looked at artists who use creative listing ways to create their work, using context from their lives, such as Kate Morass, Monique Prieto, Peter Davies and Tracey Emin. This served as an inspiration to our next task, which was to use the words we associated with our birthdays to create a piece on A2 paper using coloured pens.
In particular, I found Kate Morass' work inspiring due to her bright, colourful and bold typography with creative patterns and layout.
I started to create large fonts of the words I had produced on my piece of paper, starting with the age I turned in large bubble writing type font and then surrounding the presents I had received on those birthdays with typography and colours I believed connotated the words. I then added colours, drawings and patterns to make my work more interesting and graphic.
I think this turned out okay, however, I originally wanted to fill the page with words and patterns and should have considered my spacing and size of these words more carefully to create a busier and fuller page.
We were then told to cut out our words as close to the outline as possible to create a 'memory doily', looking at artists such as Rob Ryan and Matthew Ritchie. This I found easy considering the size of most of my typography, however, some places were harder to get a close cut and I couldn't get it as finely cut as I wanted due to the time given for the task.
We then all laid our 'doilies' over string hung up in front of a project, taking inspiration from Marcel Duchamp's 'A Mile of String. This created interesting shapes and shadows from everyone's work and created a very personal piece about the group's memories.
Although I found this piece hard because I couldn't remember past memories, I thought the overall finished pieces with all our work was very interesting and this task taught me how to use my own past to create more contextual individual pieces.
