Botanical Hybrids,
Charcoal, tracing paper, marker pen,
May 2014
These are some shots of the finished work, Botanical Hybrids (recycling the title from the Botanical Hybrids drawing series), which I finished a few hours before the show opened. I'm extremely happy that I managed to finish everything as everyone said to me that I was being very ambitious, although not to discourage me. There were several times where I thought that maybe I'd been too ambitious with what I wanted to create within the time frame I was given, however I knew that if I kept working and tried not to focus on the overall "finish line", and just get each part of the work done step by step, that I'd manage to do it; and I did.I'm unsure whether the work would be considered drawing, sculpture, installation, or a mixture of all three, however it does cross boundaries and blur lines between these art genres and terms, which is something I have done in past work and will continue to do.
Feedback from my peers was extremely positive, with many saying that the drawings are very delicate, and the work is ethereal. I never considered the work being delicate, but looking at it now I can see what they mean. I feel that the more subtle colours that I chose to work with in the tinted charcoal and marker pen look almost identical and help tie the work into one piece, and isn't too strong and dominating - I wanted the work itself to 'dominate' the space, not the colour I chose. In the finished piece the colours look identical to anybody who didn't know they were different, although I tried to match them as well as I could and feel I was successful in that. I'm unsure as to whether the tracing paper 'dominates' the space, but maybe I chose the wrong description within my proposal to begin with. Whatever descriptive work I should have used instead, I feel that the piece I created uses the space well and has been successful in what I set out to achieve. I think with this piece my confidence that I lost last semester has almost been regained, and it has proven to myself that I can still resolve my ideas into a coherent piece of work that I'm happy with and have few doubts over.
Initially I was going to create two new drawings on the walls, however I felt that I liked the first Botanical Hybrids drawings I created earlier in the semester, and in my proposal I set forward that I wanted to exhibit the original six drawings alongside the tracing paper sculpture/drawing. It was the logical decision to simply use two of those drawings within this work, in a way re-imagining them as well as me being finally able to see how such drawings look on a larger scale (something I failed to produce within my studio practice because of fast developing ideas). It was an extremely hard working week, however I'm glad I put the amount of effort into this that I did, as it was worth it for the end result and to help resolve some ideas that I've been exploring. However, these resolutions have lead onto more ideas that I could continue to explore that stem from this work, which may be something I continue to do over summer and into Level 6.