#inspireseries

Thislecture by Zoe Watson was all about her job curating. She spoke about her time at the Holden Gallery, the key points about the Holden Gallery are:

·      Its very light meaning projections and light sensitive work cannot be viewed in the main area and would need a separate, dark room

·      Its very open so sculptures are unsafe and all work has to be securely attached to the walls.

·      The open space does enable to have interesting things such as built in film work in the centre to break up the space.

 Watson also gave important points about curating in general such as:

·      Curating is about 80% admin work.

·      Work is usually hung at 150-160cm from the centre of the piece. In some cases it isn’t and that is when the piece is much larger than the average piece or when the artist/curator wants a certain part of the picture at eye level.

·      Electrical items must be PAT tested for health and safety reasons.

·      When projecting a film, to set up she would figure out exactly where/how the film is being projected and paint the rest of the wall dark grey. This creates a contrast and looks much better than being projected onto a plain white wall.

In this lecture Sally Denton spoke to us about “Macro Trends” which I felt was more useful for the fashion students but she spoke about things, which could also be incorporated into my work, she has interesting ideas and concepts.

The Marco Trends she spoke about were:

·      Universe

·      Humans

·      Generation Y (Yawn)

·      Grin Technology (Robots)

·      Body Morphing

 Out of all the topics I did find the Body Morphing the most interesting where she spoke about plastic surgery and talked about where this was leading to. She believes the future is in bionic limbs and people will be cutting off their arms and legs to have bionic replacements, people will be faster and improved if they were to do this.

Jerram was the first guest lecturer I saw for Unit X for the inspire series. He is known worldwide for his artwork that engages with the community. The projects he has done that he spoke about were:

·      “Aeolus” which is an acoustic wind pavilion designed to sing with the wind.

·      “Sky Orchestra” which is a performance artwork involving 7 hot air balloons with speakers attached to them. They flew over the city creating beautiful music.

·      “Play me I’m yours” where Jerram planted around 20 pianos for anyone to play in the streets. This has now expanded with more than 1,300 pianos all over the world.

·      “Glass Microbiology” he created glass sculptures of different viruses, which are now, are on show at museums and photographs of the art are used for medical textbooks.

·      “Park and Slide”, on May the 4th a giant 90m slide was interested into a street in Bristol for the public to use, names were picked out randomly to determine who went on it.

·      “Maya” he created a pixelated sculpture of his daughter for a train station in Bristol, it creates a sort of optical illusion. From a distance you can see a child but up close it’s a merge of pixels.