Foundation Year

From 2008 to 2009 I studied for a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at De Montfort University in Leicester. I worked in a lovely open plan studio, had access to all kinds of workshops to learn crafts and experiment with materials, learnt from some great lecturers, went on a wonderful trip to NY, and met some incredibly talented people. We also had some incredibly big, tasty pizzas (every Friday), but that's quite irrelevant. Unfortunately, I did NOT have a great camera back then, or the notion to keep all my work until such time as I could make a more worthwhile record of it, so please forgive me the image quality.

Throughout the year, we were encouraged to draw inspiration from other artists and designers, and required to keep a sort of creative diary as Contextual Studies:

Zoo Project - pictures from my sketchbook, 3D salt dough models and textile printing experimentation:

As previously mentioned, my camera wasn't up to much in those days, but that didn't stop me taking all the photos I could in NY. Some of them came out surprisingly well, but you didn't come here for my holiday snaps. As part of my journey project, my tutor suggested I make some collages out of them:

Journey Project - sketchbook pages, monoprints and rubbings from my monoprint plates:

 Ghosts In The Machine - this project was a lot of fun. I took a lot of small, cheap electronics to pieces (and other stuff that just had cool parts!), and then I sketched them, photographed them, printed with them, re-arranged them and used them to create photograms. I made plaster limbs to look like broken robot parts, a junk-heap robot out of cardboard, duct tape and odd bits, and more monoprints based on circuit boards: