Clay modelling

Here are a few of the clay models that I've been working on recently. The back three are all based on bought ornaments but the one closest to the front is imagined and i'm not sure if this one has been the most successful? I'm starting to get a feel for the material and enjoying working with clay, it feels good to be productive! I think i'm going to concentrate on working with clay for now and take a step back from the drawings, I was started to get a bit fed up of them yesterday.

Gettin' Larger!

I decided to try a big scale forest/woodland using A1 sheets of paper....I was pleased at first but I'm seriously doubting my inclusion of the figure at the bottom right hand corner. I don't want to turn the piece into something tacky, and obvious...

Maybe the piece would work better if i cropped sections and enlarged them?

New ink paintings

This week i've gone off on a slight tangent from drawings of kitsch ornaments, and have been focusing on trees and woodland. I'm not sure why I'm drawn to trees/woodland theme yet - but I must have been influenced by something! Although we did have a friday event last week and the artist Tim Collins is a researcher of the environment/nature so that may be the link!

New Website!

I'm just in the middle of setting up my own website and how bought the domain name and web hosting!

www.nicola-spencer.co.uk

I've only got a couple of pages on it so far but i'm gonna try and get it mostly finished by the end of the month. xx

I tried adding colour to some of my ink drawings this week and I don't think they've turned out too badly! I'm going to work on the scale of them and try both big scale and small scale works to see the impact this has on how my is read/interpreted. I also tried out repetition and more painterly drawings, trying to find out which one will work the best.Here's what I've come up with so far:

Ornaments

These are a couple of my charity found ornaments that I've been working from, it seems there must be quite a market for them as they were a wee bit pricey!

New drawings this week

This week I've been working in my new studio space (the biggest I've had in 4 years!) which has lots of wall space and room for me to experiment with sculptures/installation type work, I've decided to carry on with my ink drawings as I feel that they were a successful element of my work at the end of last year, and want to experiment more with them.

I'm looking into the theme of the household, and in particular objects which are representative of the home. One of the areas that I'm focusing on are ornaments (mainly kitsch), how women are represented and also mental health. My dissertation this year is focusing on women and the diagnosis of mental health and it is something that I want to try filter through to my art work.

Here are a series of drawings that I've been working on that are studies of collected ornaments: