Statement

I have quickly learnt that being imaginative and creative with the development of ideas and incorporating influences from everything around me is of primary importance and has enabled me to continue to improve and broaden the approach to my studies.

I am enthusiastic about creating meaningful, intelligent and poignant messages in my work. I have been influenced by the psychological aspects of advertising and how it creates an emotional link between the message and the audience.

In my most recent work I have used my interest in drawing and portraiture by linking this with text to express issues relating to dark and repressed secrets. My interest lies with the reasons why people are ashamed of these thoughts, confessions, fears and whether the media has an influence, or even perhaps control, over people’s perceptions of normality and stereotyping. My photographic documentation of the student fees protest was an example of the power of the media and peoples instinctive nature to go along with ‘the norm’.

I am impressed by Manchester and the way you get to study more specific areas of graphic design in the 2^nd year with digital media being of great interest to me. When I visited for the Graphic Design Open Day, I discovered that there is the opportunity to go on and complete a Master’s Degree in Art Direction, which is a career I aspire to. With its effortless style and friendly atmosphere, Manchester is a city of endless opportunity and I feel it would be a fantastic environment to study and mature in. I believe strongly that my tenacity and enthusiasm will carry me to success in the future and has got me to where I am today. I aspire to be successful in all I do and realise that, not only hard work, but a single minded determination to achieve will help me get to where I want to be in life.

Life Drawing



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 Life Drawing - Charcoal and Ink.



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 The development of my observation drawing of Clint Eastwood into a stencil style poster design.

Post Secret Collection

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A few of the most decorative and well illustrated postcards from the many post secrets that I collected.

Charcoal Drawings

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Inspired by some life drawing where the mark was made by removing charcoal from paper in order to represent the light falling on the human figure, I took some photos and produced these charcoal drawing as a result. I've always had a passion for charcoal drawing and feel that these images convey darkness and have very spooky elements.

Basic Text and Image

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I used the results of my light and shadow photographs to produce a series of images which entail messages from the post secrets I collected. I like the idea that the faces are coming out of the dark and shedding light in the same way people can shed light on a secret and metephorically speaking come out of the dark about something. And also how if you look close enough (or get to know someone well enough) their thoughts and opinions are written all over them and can be hard to hide.

Stencil Graphics

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Here are some of my experimentations with different ways of stencilling an image using various mediums such as cut out vinyl stickers, pastels, newspaper and charcoal. The newspaper stencil represents the way people’s thoughts and opinions are usually based on, or at least greatly influenced by, the media that we see and hear every day.

Daily Manipulator

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I feel strongly about the way in which newspapers constantly portray news stories in a negative manner to the 'easily malleable' public. I understand how hysteria and controversy is usually of greater interest and is more attention grabbing to people and that is human nature, but is it always a good thing? Therefore, using advanced photoshop skills, I was able to create an image that would essentially undermine the newspaper but not in the negative 'spoof' style that is witnessed so commonly. I wanted to invert the stories so that they were in some way a positive spin on a headline or at least something that would produce a positive, or even humorous, reaction.

Student Protest and Post Secret

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I decided to document the rise in student fees protest in my local town through photographs. To me this is a prime example of the power of the media and the natural instinct of people to go along with the crowd, very literally in this case. I was able to speak to some of the students about exactly why they had chosen to conform to this protest and unfortunately the general consensus proved that the majority had a very limited understanding of the subject at hand and were merely revelling in the excitement of being absent form college and marching and chanting down the street. I've merged these pictures with some of the post secrets to portray how sometimes you need to look deeper to see what people are really thinking. The styles used have been influenced by artists such as Gillian Wearing, Blek le Rat and Banksy.

Lips

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The idea here was to interpret the post secrets that I collected and convert them into a graphic or image that would portray the pictures that I imagined when reading them. Essentially, how could I turn these very graphic, powerful thoughts, confessions and fears into more identifiable images? Here are a few of the examples that I enjoyed playing around with.

Sand Blasted Mirrors



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 I produced a series of sand-blasted mirrors using Adobe Illustrator and the Vinyl Cutter to produce graphics and text. The graphic has been developed from the shapes formed by the light falling on the models face and the text is a secret collected from my post secret project (Even in a crowd of people, I still feel alone). It represents young girls distorted perception of themselves derived from peer pressure and influences from the media, main culprits being young women’s gossip magazines. The primary mesage of the peice is to represent how the girl struggles to see her own beauty in the mirror and hence why you’re not able to see the reflection of the red rose in her hair.

Perception of Text

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I wanted to explore whether people have a different emotional response to reading text if it presented in a very different fashion, whether its a change in typography, medium used or the environment in which the observer reads it. Here are two very contrasting styles of presenting the same peice of text. I would say the text itself could be percieved in different ways purely dependant on the person viewing them.

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Text, Image and Meaning

Development of image and its meaning

Here are 3 images merged to show the development of an image and its meaning. I wanted to experiment with how the meaning of an image can be altered by how and what you use to produce it. I wanted to answer questions like 'Does the time taken to produce something affect its personal value to the artist and can that be translated to its audience?' and 'Does something have to have an interpretable meaning for it to be a good picture?'. I produced an oil painting of the original photograph and developed that further by overlaying a quote from Gerhard Richter which I believe sums up the notion of an image having meaning very well. The basic computerised font was used to portray how an oil painting, something that takes many hours to produce and yet has little interpretable meaning, can be edited so quickly through modern technology to produce something that has so many more layers and underlying meanings to it.