This was a self-negotiated project and I thought it would be easier to start on a subject I was already reading about. I was doing an essay with the question: 'Portable living has obliterated our need for place. Discuss with specific examples.'
I took a philosophical approach in my essay so this is what I wanted to do in my practical work. However, visualising my ideas became extremely difficult and it was a big learning curve for me.
I started by trying to look at how we shape our space and I went straight into the looking at straight lines i.e. fences etc.


I did some pretty basic and uninspiring drawings and then moved onto the idea of mapping. which also didn't work very well. I did a lot of artist research for this project but it was so broad that it just became confusing and I wasn't sure what to focus on. 


I my tutorial I was told to be more experimental with my drawing. So I needed drawing material. This lead me onto film to act as a source of visual information that I could work from in the studio. I filmed a journey that I was familiar with because a lot of the mapping research I found was about everyday journeys that individuals took and how they could be visualised. 

There were some interesting visuals from the filming, because my hand was swinging by my side everything looked like it moving quite dramatically. I tried to capture the movement in drawing and used a much larger scale to try and get out of my sketchbook.

I tried to used a range of media and styles but I wasn't happy with them because I didn't feel like they would move me forward. Although my tutorial group liked them I decided not to carry on with this style of drawing.
















I carried on with this, very different, style of drawing because I found it the most enjoyable. I was taking shapes, colours and patterns from the film footage I had and then reconfiguring them to create some new and original imagery. I like them but I don't know how much they are telling me about space and place. Have I taken the images from a space and created a personal place with them?

These are the kind of questions I have to start thinking about if I'm going to come to any sort of conclusion in 6 weeks.

I moved on to something a bit more familiar, sound drawings, as well as drawings recording touch specifically on the feet whilst walking a journey. At this point I have chosen a specific journey to focus on to narrow down the amount of information that could possibly be recorded. I think the only interesting thing that emerged from these recordings was the sock that I stitched.

I would have liked to carry on with this but I guess I just didn't see the potential. I was using stitch which obviously is something I want to consider in my work but I didn't see how this was solving my problem when trying to understand space and place. However, I think that this way of visualising the effects of a space translates onto the body and it could be said that a space turns into place when a body is present within it. This could have been an interesting route to go down but it was not the route I chose.




After getting really stuck and confused again I just went back to some large scale drawings and just let myself paint. The results weren't great but I was definitely interested by how much it reminded me of some of the film footage I had taken at night, there were a lot of cars and shop lights and with the movement of my hand they were very blurred.







On top of these paintings I put some of the very initial drawings I did from the filming and this is where I hit my break through. In terms of space and place I came to the definitions:
Place = the experience of a space
Space= the physical and the visual aspects
This is a very brief explanation of how I got to this and what I mean so I tried to create more examples and samples to confirm my findings.








There was also this image which was significant for me because it started to look into 'shaping' an experience. Maybe it's about the space shaping our experience of it and therefore form the feeling of place or not as the case may be; because not every space may feel like a place. It also has tracing paper overlapping the edges to represent the 'unclear' nature of this idea and process because I can only work (in this time) on my own thoughts and feelings, so it won't apply to everyone or even anyone else.













This was based on another experience of the same journey. I travelled whilst drawing what I saw and noting what I felt. Then back in the studio I started to draw from these notes. The drawings weren't right, I thought that making it 3D and putting it in a space and also upping the scale would help so that's what I did. It worked much better in a large space but due to lack room I settled on making a model as an installation proposal. Again, I have translated the experience using colours and textures along with images I drew along the way to create the visual representation of space and place.


















I also wanted to look at different kinds of experiences and different 'spaces' now that I am some what comfortable with the definitions of space and place and have a process to work from. This experience is based on memories and photo's taken. I had been thinking recently about photo's and how many week take that will we probably never look at again. So for a while I tried taking pictures of things that only had a specific memory or emotion attached to them. Going to the ballet production of Madame Butterfly at The Grand Theatre, Leeds was one of the experience I only wanted to document what I knew I would remember. Unfortunately I couldn't record any of the dancing.

Anyway, I drew from the photographs I had taken and also started creating some patterns that complimented the memory of the experience.






I ended up with some very intricate cut work and built lots of layers I this piece. I definitely don't think it's my most successful but it is another example of how this process can change very dramatically depending on the space and place I'm in.









 I finished my project on one final example and this was not a journey or a memory but rather sitting in a space and drawing what I saw and what I felt was significant. It was a bright and warm day and I was sitting in the small park outside uni with friends eating an ice-cream. My imagery was of the surroundings and to portray my experience I chose a different material which was transparent, coloured plastic. I chose this because I wanted something light and I knew I wanted to hanging this in a space as is shown below.

This was an extremely tough project and writing down my journey through it has been difficult but I am happy with my final sample and I think it was something I can take forward and maybe translate for a competition about lace, using the cut work.