Manchester University - Degree show.
When I arrived at the Manchester University degree show I did not expect the range of different specialist designs that were available to view, also I did not expect there to be digital and animated pieces of work that you could interact with either.
Some of the work interested me because you were able to see the design processes and how the person who created the work got to the final piece. Also some of the degree students had left blank sketchbooks out so people could comment on their individual shows. I think this was done so they would read comments and other suggestions about their work so in future they could change and improve areas that other people may not have liked.
I found the pieces with an explanation of what it was showing or doing more inspirational and informative rather then leaving me feeling confused and unsure of the work, however I think some designs are meant to invoke different emotions like uncertainty or an uneasy confusion like the videos of the girl rocking on a black and white screen or the videos on several screens that looked similar to the popular Saw films.
There were several sections of the show which I thought were not as well set out as they could have been, in one case there was a few small images on one large wall and opposite there was a wall with multiple large images on it from the same collection of work. The designer could have been trying to draw attention to the smaller images by singling them out rather than placing them next to a larger image but I feel the space didn’t seem like it was used as well as it could have been. However there was a section of the fine arts show that I think was really well laid out, they had hung a 3 tier shelf on one side of the wall to display their influences, this was antiques and other memorabilia from the 1950’s which included old coins, tins and children’s toys amongst much more. I felt the wall of items that had influenced them looked like a piece of art in itself.
The illustration and animation section of the show was the part that interested me most as it was more based around the digital process of design and showed detailed development stages that lead up to the final outcome. It was also interesting to see how university students organised their sketchbooks and how they started out the designs. I preferred the designs that were less based around textile work and more based around the combination of digital and traditional methods as this is an area of design I would like to peruse, although it was still interesting to see what people had created using textiles and embroidery such as Gemma walker who starts off by using inks and stamps then added hand and machine needle work to the image.
There were a lot of sketches of the human form and of animals around the illustration part of the show. I really liked the technical drawings by Peter Carrington who focused his work on the dynamics of animals. He is an excellent draughtsman and his sketches are very life like and clean. I also enjoyed Zia Chan’s sketches; on one of his pieces he combined a human body with an animal head to create his illustration.
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