The Rambling Art Student: Project Two: Poor Art

Like this project and others to follow - we were debriefed the first day of each new project and given the brief.

In our Brief, it explained that they wanted us to - "Explore the creative possibilities of creating something within the context of modern and contemporary sculpture practice : and ask you to consider meaning, function and history as implicit in objects and materials themselves"

I had never heard of Poor Art before and did a little bit of research on my own -
Poor Art or Arte Provera - A Modern Italian Art movement during 1960's to 1970's.
Artists of this movement would use a wide range of materials instead of the traditional ones.

Further detailed information on this subject can be found on the website below -
http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/a/arte-povera

The brief also had a little insight too - The term Arte Povera was introduced by the Italian art critic, writer and curator Germano Celant in 1967. He used it to identify a group of artists from Turin, Milan, Genoa and Rome who were working in radically new ways; entering new dialogues with trends elsewhere in Europe and America.

After this, I pondered for sometime. What could I make and what meaning could it have?
I didn't want to spend money on materials, there's plenty lying out there in the streets, pasted to the walls and growing on the stairs but I also had some very interesting objects at home.

I finally came up with the title that everyone could relate to and has been used so often in different ways - "Home is where the heart is".
The reason why I chose this is its very personal to me - After living with my mother for so long, I moved in with my partner. At first it was strange, being away from what you thought was 'home' then your thoughts and feelings change, your living at your new 'home'.

So I went home and gathered my materials - a birdcage candle holder, some of our cats hair and a bag of my partners hair, some white wool, copper thread. Later I went out for a walk and grabbed some moss.

With the hair - I pleated it and at each end wrapped the copper thread to stop it from unravelling. As you can see in the photo above, I used the bars of the birdcage to weave the hair in and out, creating a wall.
Using white wool and the skills I gathered from the Scoubidou trend, I wrapped the wool round the bars and made windows and a door frame. I did this so that I could sew the pleaded strands to the frames instead of wrapping them around. Making it neater and tidier and look more like a house.

Once the walls were finished I moved on to the next stage, the roof. Instead of sticking the sticks directly onto the frame, I used the last of the wool and wrapped it around the frame so that there was more surface for the sticks to hold onto. As shown below -

I don't have any good photo's of the last stage, when the roof is on but you can clearly see it in the last photo when all the pieces have come together.

So I moved on to the last little bit to be made. The heart - I liked the idea of it being on paper, almost like a card. During my college course, I experimented with something similar and liked the turn out. So using rice paper, I sewed red thread around the outlines of a heart drawing and then used watercolour to enhance the overall colour.

The last item, I had previously knitted a little rain cloud. I was inspired my a post on Pinterest of a rain cloud brooch. I thought it would look nicer as a wall piece. Later I realised that it had another purpose. When the radiators came on the rain drops would sway and wobble notifying me the heating was one.

Above is the last photo of it all together. I was originally going to put an LED candle instead, the house but realised that if the studio had been darker it would have been more affective but at the same time the heart and cloud would be less noticeable.

I took some photo's of other students work, none had name titles.