Getting ready for assessments...

I’ve spent the day exhibiting existing work, experimenting with the layout and considering what will be most visually interesting for the assessment set up.

Print seminar interactive piece

Here is a video i made during the event, and the first video i've attempted to edit... i hope it works!

Untitled from Victoria Lafford on Vimeo.

Print Seminar performances and workshop

Second year print students came together in the main lecture theatre to create a morning event exhibiting ideas and interacting with one and others practices... i put together an interactive piece here are some photos of the outcome...

Una Grimes- visiting artist lecture

Her work explores the narratives, of both historical as well as fictional characters. She is very influenced by film and costume, and spent some time during her childhood in the constume department at the Victoria and Albert museum. I really love the idea of spending time with contume and being able to escape into different eras or continents, the costumes work as a time machine transporting people whether their in the performance or watching it, the clothes are given so much power. It must be amazing to have the opportunity and the skills to be able to create such things. The clothes hold so much narrative and even more so when they are actually put to their function in a performance.

I had a tutorial with Una this afternoon, we discussed a few ways in which I could take things further….

• Try presenting latex on concrete
• Language
• Ethnological displays
• Questioning where things come from and their cultural use contrasting
their museum surroundings.
• Dallas Seitz
• Lindsay Seers
• Pitt Rivers
• Yinka Shonibare
• Susan Hiller

London exhibitions

A friend sent me a link a while back about the opening of a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I rarely go to this gallery space, but this contemporary South African photography exhibition looked as if it could definitely fuel my practice further. I found the exhibition very interesting visually and also how prominently political the imagery was. This is something that I’m afraid of within my own practice, but here it seemed verymuch the point to be expressing these political messages, it seemed very much about the honesty of a photograph and exploring this honesty through every individuals eye. The imagery because of this honesty was shocking as well as moving for the viewer, you were seeing people who are really passionate about what they believe in and it felt like it was shot through the camera lens of someone who shared a similar passion.

Images from installation space

back on english soil...

Being back in the studio after a three week trip to Kenya feels really strange... Going from a texturally and culturally rich environment to a bare white walled institutionalised environment is an odd shock to the system! i have the installation space booked for the rest of the day and tomorrow, i'll have to embrace this polar setting to make the most of the space that i've got...

whilst away, and being aware that i'd have this space soon after returning, i'd made some latex samples of interesting textures found surrounding my everyday living space. i also documented each latex sample by taking a photo of where i took the peel from, as after peeling it has proved fairly difficult to tell where i pulled the samples from. i intended to make each piece of latex a size that could be representative of the formatting of a standard photograph. i wanted to steer away from photographic documentation as i was uneasy with how it can be mistaken for a colonial or more political representations of the area, or as just holiday photography...