point six six last day

Today is our last day. Thank you to everyone who has come and visited us, we are open till 4.30 today if you are at a lose end and want to see us.

Our first sales!

Friday was our first proper day of being open. We had a nice stream of people in and by the end of the day two of our artists had sold work Alice Finch and Lucy Hubbard.

Congratulations guys.

Spotlight on Alice Finch

Alice Finch

These figurative ceramic pieces and paintings are expressing the complicated relationship between women and the beauty industry. The ropes made of flax are meant to represent a woman’s hair plaited and then utalized by it’s time consuming nature, to bind and restrain the woman from persuing more productive activities.

I found this old fashioned method of advertising with fear still being utalised by cosmetic and fashion companies. The continued pressure for women to perform is cemented in the cultural fibre by increasing the importance of “engineered beauty” and ridiculing public female figures for not attaining the “standard” demanded by the Industry.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth” Lenin.

This dehumanising of a women’s body into public property has bound the everyday women into a constant battle to maintain a “beauty ideal” or she has failed as a women.

“Men look at women .Women watch themselves being looked at( in modern media)”Critic John Berger.
The option is to opt into the beauty motived crowd or face continuous alienation from the social norm thus creating a perpetual cycle of fear and undermined confidencein the female populace. Although gender roles set by media stereotypes are equally damaging to me , I felt there was a stronger visual to be explored with focusing on female themes.

Spotlight on Becca Jones

Becca Jones

The inspiration for my work is taken from nature, looking at macro patterns and repetition in circular/spherical forms in flowers and seedpods.
I make my work out of porcelain. By press moulding, texturing and sticking metal pins into the porcelain I make small scale vessels which are not functional. The pins are put into the clay before firing, and they come out quite brittle and matt blue/grey in colour, which, in my opinion, contrasts with the translucent white porcelain.

Spotlight on Danny Waples

Danny Waples

Meditations in thought?

My work portrays a level of conscious thought. Considered and composed to provide a datum, a point reference, where I am able to see the wood and the trees. Need and purpose for simplicity, an economy of orderly structure that is reflected through objects. Investigating balance and volumes positively and negatively, experimenting with transitions in plane, light and line. I am attempting to catch a moment, with movement, flow and energy; as the hand and the eye move around the object, to engage and focus, mentally and physically.

Working with white plaster, pure and clean, each piece feels like a hundred pencil sketches, but in every aspect better. The material represents questions of value, of how we perceive and judge. They have purpose and utility as illustrations of thought; in tokens, objects used as evidence, symbols defined with contents and meaning. Considering permanence, does the fragility of the plaster enhance a beauty in the transient nature of their and our existence, our thoughts and feelings?

Offering a direct connection, they are something you can hold on to and feel, as our perceptions can be deceiving. I want to hold on for a moment as through these I have found a peace and calm in a balance of complexities.

Eloquence in simplicity

Spotlight on Esther McLaughlin

Esther Mclaughlin

Half Cooked
My work is about capturing and highlighting the beauty of the last moments of an animal’s life before decay begins. The resin holds the artefacts in a moment, suspended amongst dust particles, unchangeable by time.
The title however, reflects where I feel my work stands at this current time; an exciting and fruitful idea, arrived just a little too late in the day for full realisation.

Opening Night

Last night we had our private view. It went really well with lots of people coming in to see our work. There was plenty of wine drunk, and hopefully contacts made. I spent a lovely hour this morning straightening the gallery and enjoying some quiet time in this lovely space. I shall be very sad to pack it all away on Monday.

We also managed to get a nice picture of the point six six crew.

Finishing touches

Thursday was a filled with finishing touches, it is amazing just how many times you can nudge a piece of sculpture till it is perfect. And things which seemed like a really good idea like handmade folded business cards were great in the end but meant there was a good hour of sticking and folding.

Every nudge, paint splash and drilled hole was worth it. The space looked brilliant, just in time for our private view.

Spotlight on Joshua Devenish

Joshua Devenish 

The natural environment and the use of natural found wood is the main driving force behind my work. Using materials such as bark, bog oak and rotten branches to create something beautiful to be appreciated instead of overlooked. I aim to make people look deeper into nature and see it for what it really is, looking beyond the surface to discover
how exiting even the most mundane of materials can be. My work shows the relationship between man and nature, how nature is changed over time through a series of interventions both natural and man made. Revealing the unseen I hope to understand this history of interventions to then add my own, using geometric shapes and order amongst the natural forms. Resembling mans influence on the
environment to create a simplistic style that abstracts and enhances the material.

Spotlight on Anne Blades

Anne Blades

My main interest is in nature and in particular trees; they are the major influence and starting point of my work. I want to capture the invisible essence of trees, the spirit. To achieve this I have been working with the grain of the wood, as this, along with all its knots tells part of the life story of each individual tree. I have burnt into the wood and then sandblasted the black back, which emphasises the colours. In some cases I have burnt right through the wood to allow a sense of what is going on below the surface.

Point six six catalogue

We wanted to produce a catalogue for the show, but as we needed to keep the overheads low we opted to go for a digital catalogue for people to download. You can either view the catalogue below, or click the download button at the bottom and download a copy.Catalogue Point Six Sixfinal

Spotlight on Lucy Hubbard

Lucy Hubbard

My work takes inspiration from life around me, family history and times that have
passed. Using postcards, photographs and family documents as references in my
work, gives me a personal connection with the things I am making.

Narrative is also a big part of my work, allowing a small insight into the past through
the words of someone else.

I have experimented with layering in a mixed media approach to achieve the
portrayal of a memory. This has developed into work using Perspex as the main
material and printing onto this to create a translucent image.

This work demonstrates life, and appreciating the small things, a thinking taken from
family documents as well as post-war slogans.

Here we go....

It's finally the day. Monday morning I picked up the keys and the list of selected artists and work and got ready for a crazy week. The first window sticker went up, amid much frustration and un-straight lines, and then we got to the fun bit of arranging plinths, hanging work and eating celebratory biscuits.

Windows looking good full of art and people:

Time to start drilling, and moving pieces many, many, many times

And at about 6pm it all got a bit much for me, so it was time for sitting, delegating and then a nice bottle of crabbies and Craft Cwtch at The Courtyard.

 Wednesday will be full of plinth painting and catalogue designing.

Spotlight on Emma Hughes

Emma Hughes

Earth geography has always been an interest of mine.

Within this, I have focused on crystals and stalactite/stalagmites to inspire my glass ring collection, as I am intrigued by the angular qualities and triangular structures.

I sculpt my rings in jewellers wax, and then create plaster moulds from these. The wax is then melted out of the mould and replaced with glass. I appreciate glass as a medium, as it is unpredictable how the colour will flow inside the mould. This to me also relates to lava flowing beneath the earth’s surface.

Cracking each mould open is like a surprise present.

Spotlight on Nik Burns

Nik Burns

I draw my inspiration from a passion for the fantastical.

The work that I create has an element of mystery, it is my intention for the viewer to be drawn in by the work and ask the questions what and why?

These small scale sculptural pieces are informed by my long held love of mysterious ship wrecks, a love which has fascinated me since childhood.  What I achieve in my work is the illusion of an organic occurrence to a man-made form, creating a ‘life history’. The desire to create forms like this stems from my interest in fantasy and science fiction genres in particular the work of HG Wells and JRR Tolkien.

These pieces were formed from sections of copper sheet which were then welded together. The surfaces are treated using chemical processes, giving a textured patina. The surfaces are endlessly varied as the processes involved allows for little intervention once it has begun. 

Spotlight on Anna Blair

Anna Blair

Nature is a constant source of inspiration for me and a strong influence on my work. It never fails to provide new, interesting and captivating subject matter. For this project I have become quite fascinated with lichen, the delicate subtle qualities which usually go unnoticed have really captured my attention. Also the contrast between this delicacy and the structural, elegant, linear qualities of bamboo is something I have tried to capture within my work.

My lighting pieces are made from Lutradur, a heat modifiable material, I have combined this with organza, shocked silk and satin fabrics to add tone and subtle difference in texture.

And the judges have chosen....

We finally have our list of exhibitors for the show. We have work ranging from Jewellery to textiles, to ceramics and contemporary metal smithing. Over the next few days we are going to show work from each of the artists as well as a few behind the scenes posts - these involve a lot of white paint.... you have been warned!

Preparation is the name of the game

The studio is currently a hive of activity with students cleaning, sanding and painting their spaces to get ready for submission later in the week. As the spaces come together we will be putting up some pictures to show you work from the students in the group. All of the exhibits in pointsixsix are going to be chosen from the current second year Contemporary Applied Arts students final collections. Sadly there isn't enough room for everyone to exhibit at art 360 but we hope to showcase as much as we can here on the blog.

The pieces are going to be selected by our two curators Mark Houghton (http://www.markhoughton.com) and Anna Falcini (http://www.annafalcini.co.uk) both practising artists who work part time at Hereford College of Arts.

What's in a name?

Today is all about flyers and posters. In an attempt to make sure that we are not just going to be all alone on our opening night we have been working on our advertising. There have been dozens of versions of our posters done and we are nearly there with our final designs. The question we have been getting a lot today when gathering opinions about this version over that version of the flyer has been "what's all the point six six about then?". Well it's quite simple really. Picking a name for a group show is very hard. Especially when you're not 100% sure what everyone is making. So we needed something a bit obscure. As we are now two weeks away from the end of our second year, we decided to celebrate the fact we are 2/3 of the way through, and point six six just looked nicer than 2/3!

point six six

image taken from http://www.art360hereford.com

'point six six' is an upcoming showing a selection of works by second year Contemporary Applied Arts students from Hereford College of Arts. This blog will showcase some of the work that will be shown as well as give you a behind the scenes of how we go about putting on a show.