Our new exhibition on the An Lanntair mezzanine showcases work from students on the National Certificate Art & Design and BA Fine Art courses with Lews Castle College UHI. These courses are delivered in North Uist at the College’s Lochmaddy Campus, based in Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre.
To celebrate the exhibition and the wonderful work on display two of the students have written blogs about their work………..
Sif C. P. Nielsen – “Contemporary Technology Sketchbook”
Someone said that it is difficult in video art to capture a viewers attention for more then just a few seconds- it is though very interesting being able to do it with a film where almost nothing happens. Not only in my collages, but also in the sheep and chair film very little happens- it kind of challenges the viewer, are you gonna keep watching nothing happening, are you sure that something is happening. Then a sudden movement, like a few flakes of dust blowing across, becomes very effective. It lights the curiosity and makes one watch very carefully for anything else to happen and why.
The theme of this must be My place, my space
Why I chose Sponish House: it needs a lot of work, but I still find all the materials, burnt- and rotten woodends, bare stone walls, dust and pilled old furniture interesting — a state of in between. I’m so easily inspired there. so i guess what I’ve made is kind of a compressed version of how I experience going there. so many things are happening, things waiting to be used, things waiting to be replaced, things being saved because of the possibility of a future use, waiting with layers of dust and screws and little charred wood stumps everywhere. it is such an interesting state, i feel so eager to start working, organising, fulfil all the great potential around the house. and still in this dusty in between state, still life of compositions appear everywhere in shapes that could never happen in a controlled set up. this place has an honesty to it, you can’t predict what is around, an absolutely wonderful place to explore. mix of old worn materials and new ready pilled floorboards, furniture of different ages and stile on top of each other once given in kindness waiting for a place somewhere, each with their own story, little boxes of nails in different sizes and a few rusty bent ones, tools out of their box set up having been used but never put away again. gathered dust, magazines about traditional restoring of old scottish buildings, holes in the floor here and there with big plywood slabs covering even though the new floor boards are there, going somewhere else to fix something in a bigger need of fixing, always somewhere else needing fixing, a beautiful painting falling out of the frame leaning against more plywood just underneath big old architectural plans of what it is supposed to look like some day.
It’s been very interesting working with this kind of film making, and I had so many more ideas along the way:
.Modeling the clips a lot more with distortion and other effects to fit collages perfect into specific spaces, implementing a green screen mask.
.Creating dark holes – appearing from several clips (with parts of shadows in them) combined into these dark holes and then ironically projected with light.
.Working with strong lamps along side the projector creating big shadows and having the collages emerge from shadows.
Anyway, working with this kind of moving image collage – not just one clip at a time but about 20 on top of each other to have them play at the same time – turned out to test the strength of my laptop more then I thought. Just scaling or rotating a clip involves a LOT of lag and lets not mention the rendering! I’m not satisfied with the finished collage, I wanted to take it further. For now though I think it represents quite well what the idea was, and I might come back to this kind of film making – when the frustrations have past.
For the full blog please visit – http://ctsketchbook.blogspot.co.uk/
Holly Moffat – Hardy “Digital Collage — A Sense of Place”
One of the first things I have to sink my teeth into is creating a digital collage. Collage has always been a bit of a funny thing for me, something that I have always have a bit of a juddering start with. What I like about collage is the messiness of it (or how it can be messy, if you choose) so to create on via photoshop, where it’s all very clean and shiny is going to be an interesting exercise. The starting point is to select a piece of poetry (or lyric), a line or two, on the theme of place. Something that “evokes imagery, and locality. A place that has a particular meaning to you”.
So, a line or two. My first thoughts were immediately of Bowie, what with his passing still being far too raw and unreal to deal with, then of Neruda who I think has a beautifully glimmering way with words. From Bowie, both lyrics that I’m inclined to are from Space Oddity (an artistic masterpiece in its own right);
— “And the stars look very different today”
— “For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do.”
While I love both of these, I think maybe they’re too broad/vague??
From Neruda there’s a few that cropped up after a little searching. A line from 3 separate poems, all of which I feel inclined to.
— “Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.” You Are The Daughter of the Sea
— “Here on the island
the sea
and so much sea
overflowing,” Ode to the Sea
— “Next to the sea in autumn,” Your Laughter
The latter is from possibly my favourite poem of his, that line singularly because it combines both my affinities with being beside the sea, and autumn itself as a season. Particularly on the Western Isles I’ve found, despite the lack of trees, the gorgeous colourings of the seaweed as the season grows and dies, is always breathtaking. Despite this though, I think the middle selection is what I’m drawn to. Having only last year moved to the Western Isles, being so isolated and surrounded by the sea on these incredible islands, it definitely stands out.
For the full blog please visit – http://hramona.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/digital-collage-sense-of-place.html
The exhibition will be displayed in the An Lanntair mezzanine gallery until the 19th of August.