I now have my Current work displayed on my new website on the link below....

http://vikkihayman.wix.com/victoria-hayman#

Please have a look

Thank you.

Developing Art Practice

So for this project I had to produce an artist proposal to be submitted for either an commission piece or for an artist in residence. I decided after my researched into cosmology and planetary sciences that i would apply to the Centre of Astrophysics and Planetary Science (CAPS) at the university of Kent with a Dr. Duncan MacKay.


To start my research i started looking at Anish Kapoor and his pieces 'Non-Ojects' (image 1)

Image 1

This is one of my favourite as i have personally had the pleasure to experience the effect of standing inside. When inside you gain a real sense of distoriation and feel consumed by the black space around you. Because of the concave shape i found myself, with the  reverse upside down reflection, feeling dizzy and nausias. Even though this experience was not very nice and in thinking about me is making my dizzy i find it fansinating how this polished black almost egg shaped sculpture can create such a strong sensual experience. I would like to use this idea of an uneasy felling with in my own work as i felt it heightens the views senses and changes there perception of there sounding space.


Another Artist who has recently inspired me was James Turral and his use and understanding of light to create a body of work. He has studied astronomy, psychology, mathmatics, fine art, art history and the psychology of perception. I find this amazing along side his heritage of a father who was an aeronautical engineer and a educator mother who was a quaker that James has this deeper understanding of the theroy of light and how to use it within his work to create installations that engulf the viewer and aulters their percetion of the space in which they stand. Like Kapoor, Turral uses colour in a way that the audience feel surrounded and emerged with in the peice like in the image below (image 2)

Image 2

With all of his understanding from his studies Turrel has a fasination with challenging the audience's understand or persective of viewing our sky and universe and one way her does this is my his peices where he cuts a hole in the ceiling in a room as if putting a frame around the sky as to draw the audiences eye upwards. (image 3)

Image 3

It is his fasination with challenging the audience perception and the night sky where i find myself drawn in. Turrells latest project called Rodins Crater is one project that i feel brings all his knowledge together. Quoted by him:


"I wanted to use the very fine qualities of light. First of all, moonlight. There's a space where you can see your shadow from the light of Venus alone- things like this. I also wanted to gather starlight that was from outside the planetary system, which would be from the sun or reflected off of the moon or a planet...you've got this older light that's away from the light even of our galaxy. So that is light that would be at least three and a half billion years old. So you're gathering light that's older than our solar system."
- James Turrell

To better explain how and what Turrell in visions this piece to do i have included a video interview.

It is save to say that i have also inquired a thirst in knowing and understanding more about our natural planet and the night sky and plan to investigate more.

The Beginning to an End

So I have now started the beginning to the end of the 3rd and final year of a BA student and once again i find myself wanting to start a fresh project with new and exciting prospects. So where to start.....

Anish Kapoor is a good old place as any. I find his work amazes me with these gigantic sculptures which just engulf the viewer. In his piece 'yellow' 1999 (image 1) Kapoor simulates the blurring the boundaries between space and form with it monumentally scale of a receding hole with in its centre. The colour just fills the viewers eye which in turn can cause a sense of disorienting and uncertainly of there surrounding space and engulfs the viewer on many different sensory levels.

Image 1

This project is entitled Developing fine art practise and consists of a body of work and research into applying to an arts residence in developing a proposal.During this project I plan to continue in my research in to the cosmos and some of the physics behind it. I wish to investigate further into the birth and death of stars and how the elements are made.


Practically I plan to experiment on found materials and find ways to manipulate them so they visually excite me in a pattern or formly shape, and reflect my research. Finally I would like to create an installation which is atmospheric and disorienting as to cause the viewer I feeling of uneasiness, this in turn should cause the viewers senses to by heightened and become more intuitive but in contrast to relate to the audience I want my work is to be familiarising.

My Practical Responce

So in light of all of my research i am now thinking out the different ideas in creating a piece of work based on this idea of Utopia/Dystopia. I feel that even after all the freedom we have gain since the Age of Enlightenment through advancing science and higher thinking, goes hand in hand with our own ruin and that we are now, as a human race, having to not only fight against our self's to find peace and harmony but also with the planet. There is no mistaking that currently this year has seen the highest rise in natural disaster which could be due to the possibility of global warming or through the new theory of the natural course of our planet intake of radiation from the sun. But what we are unsure about is the question of if we can survive it. So cumming back to my current project i have had some ideas. 

The first idea i had was in responce to the carbon cycle that the plant has to create a state of Equilibrium, and to do this i could collect every day material objects that people use with branding and place them in an installation designed as a room. I would paint all the room and items in it grey. The reason for this would be because i want the work to have a double meaning as i have often hear the frase "grey areas" as a term to describe a more complicated situation where i would use it as a way to simplify the objects and there surroundings to discard the desire for the now unbranded object as i feel it is this desire for creating an personal materialistic utopia that is causing over consumption. But i felt this idea did not quite reflect my research enough.

My second idea is to have a sculpture that represents us humans that could slowly decompose and disintegrate over time and in contrast at the bottom of this sculpture i could have a plant that would slowly grow up and over this sculpture to eventually take over in it's place. (image 1)

image 1

So now i wanted to think about the materials i wish to use. firstly i thought of sculpting a female figure out of clay so i  drew some choice of poses for example (image 2 and 3) but i then decided that having a female figure was to literal and gender specific.

image 2

image 3

So going back to the drawing board i came up with the idea of having either a DNA strand to represent humans (image 4) or the possibility of a skyline of buildings as architecture has been a very big part of our evolution and resembles modernism (image 5)

Image 4

Image 5

I also thought of using found material that represent consumption to create the sculpture. so now i moved on to the idea of the plants to represent the planet. i am wondering if using a plant is to literal as well or fitting but i did see a piece of work by Roger Hiorns in the Saatchi gallery which inspired me to look into crystals. (image 6) Hiorns uses copper sulfate to create this beautiful blue crystals which look like little ice burgs so i felt these could work with my work.

image 6

So i decided to visit the science department to see what i would do to recreate this effect. They were very helpful as Mr Stephan Persons demonstrated who to make some beautiful crystal from copper and copper sulfate which resulted in beautiful delicate crystal as imaged below. 

I also created crystals from home using boiling water and salt as resulted as images below.

Practical this is far as i have got but i look forward to continuing with this for the rest of the year and try and develop further and hopefully producing some interesting pieces of work.

Earth's Revenge!

Us humans use and abuse the earth natural resources and what do we expect to happen in return, nothing??? Well while researching into Utopia/Dystopia i have found that not only do we currently live in world of Dystopia ranging from poverty, war and other person on person crimes but also from ignorance! through our forever growing greed, our consummation and our reliance on fuel we are committing one of the biggest crimes on our self's and allowing our planet to also descend into a world of Dystopia. we are so obsessed with health and safety by throwing out un brought food and producing more waste, it makes me laugh to think this is in turn very bad for our health, we are destroying our atmosphere and causing Global warming and this is lead to believed by scientist can cause natural disasters.

   Climate scientists have been assembling a body of evidence that has been growing significantly with each year from tree rings, ice cores and coral reefs taken with instrumental observations of air and ocean temperatures, sea ice melt and greenhouse gas concentrations have all emerged in support of climate change theory. An Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson has spent his career trekking to the far corners of the world to find remote ice fields and then bring back cores drilled from their centers. Within those cores are the records of ancient climate from across the globe according this web site http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/5200event.htm. he also backs up this idea of global warming being the cause of natural deasters.

But how dose it effect us directly?? 2011 saw the biggest number of natural disasters ranging from earthquakes and tsunami's in Japan to crippling floods in Louisiana, USA. I find my self trying to explain how we need to act now but David Mitchell dose it allot better in this link http://gu.com/p/32vx5. But why should we worry you could be asking well here are some images of why.

Just think if we don't act this could one day be were you or your family live.

1984, the year of my birth and what else???

Civilisations are becoming more and more selfish for preparing they own utopian lives but why have we become so selfish?

The book 1984 (image below) by George Orwell may explain why. I can see by how Orwell story writtern 40 years before its setting in 1948 that our world in the future can become so manipulated to become selfish. 1984 is a dystopian novel about how after a global war the world is run by 3 main states, one which is Oceania formally know as england, this state was ruled by a dictated power structure called Big Brother who watched nearly everyones lives through surveillance.

   It is this dictating party who was responsible for the destruction of main character Wilson Smiths family that lead him to work for them with an alternative motive to rebel and destroy Big Brother. During this quest Smith falls in love with julia, which in the end becomes his downfall. Big Broth finds out and captures, imprison, interrogate and torture him after he was betrayed by a false reblien friend, In the end he betrays the reliance and julia who in turns betrays him after they where faced with there fears. After all is done and they are both brained washed to love Big Brother they then meet in a park and confess to each other

"I betrayed you", she said baldly.

"I betrayed you", he said.

She gave him another quick look of dislike.

"Sometimes", she said, "they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, 'Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.' And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself."

"All you care about is yourself", he echoed.

"And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer."

"No", he said, "you don't feel the same."

I feel this is a prime example of when controlling power that is placed with in an government run party, they can create a society that has, over time, been worn down from wanting an community or union living conditions to become very selfish and ignorent of their current countries situation, because the alternative to care and try to help others could be like hitting your head against a brick wall.

In conclusion their many, many reasons why human beings are becoming selfish and it is this selfishness that is killing our world.

Energy

There is nothing more contrasting in our world to me then driving along a man-made tarmac road, with telephone wires above and along side other cars with there zombielike drivers, and by looking up into the sky being moved by seeing these beautiful rolling clouds with the sun behind, even though the sky appears grey and sad, there in the distance is a ray of light shinning down on some little patch as if it is blessing from the heavens on who or whatever was underneath it. But it is this contrast between the man made and that of the natural world that concerns me. 

Ever since the age of the Enlightenment the freedom for intellectual thinking and science has become boundless giving way to experimentation and explorations of our world. This has lead to many new discoveries such as the laws of thermodynamics where physics explains how resources, i.e. fossil fuels, can be manipulated to release energy that we we now used to produce most of our power. This development by a number of physicists in the 1800’s helped with the Industrial Revolution that changed our world.

This was this revelation that gives us the power of machines and gave us factories and industries that we now in turn rely on so much. Our cars, mobiles, computers and our need for clothes, shoes and possessions have caused civilization to produce mass productions of material items. This may all sound great in the sense that us humans have been given so much more time for leisure and our own enjoyment and that we have these beautiful material things to look at but life craves a sense of equilibrium which is where the down side starts.
    Through physics and the second law of thermodynamics the term Entropy can often be used to mean disorganization or disorder because it is the measurement of how structures hold unused energy. This to me is alot like many sceanos of how orderd utopia systems can change to disordered dystopian systems. With in physics the term arrow of time states that due to entropy and the second law of thermodynamics all systems or structures will disintegrate into a sense of equilibrium. For example, heat always travels from hot to cold and never cold to hot, so if you had a bucket of cold water and dropped a hot stone into it, the molecules on the surface of the stone would exchange protons with the molecules of the water so the water would warm up the stone would cool down. This would continue until the temperature of the water and stone reach the same, as a state of equilibrium. Once this state had reached equilibrium the exchanging of particles would stop.

It is this knowledge of the exchanging of particles and the need for equilibrium that is how I understand the current issues of erosion within our civilization. We need energy to live and we gain most of it from the sun, which is a constant source. Now you would think that by constantly absorbing the suns heat, the earth would get hotter and hotter but this is not the case. The reason the earth dose not over heat is because of The Carbon Cycle, which is explained in the video link below.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Experiments/PlanetEarthScience/GlobalWarming/GW_Movie4.php 

This exchange of energy from the sun and within the earth has kept the earth in a state of equilibrium for years until the dawn of the industrial revolution. Humans deforesting and burning fossil fuel are creating more and more carbon dioxide and is causing the earth’s temperature to slowly rise and is seen as a possible cause of Global warming and the rise in natural disasters.