UNIT 3 CRITIQUE
So yesterday was our final critique for FIN130. It has been a great course and there has been fantastic energy in the class. Everyone has chipped in to help each other throughout the semester and there has been a great flow of creative ideas.
GROUP FEEDBACK
During the formal critique as a group, we reviewed the cardboard and wood assemblages and everyone said a few words about some of the things that had grabbed their attention, or just about the collection as a whole. Lots of themes recurred. I liked the observation that it was a very “democratic” project – we all had the same quantity and type of materials to work with. That of course lead to many people remarking what a wide range of outcomes there were. Several times people wondered where the artist might take their concepts further. A couple of people remarked on the fact that among all the pieces there were a lot of animals and other living things. The corrugated cardboard pieces in particular made people wonder how the objects would look under different lighting arrangements. These are just a few of the common themes that came up from the group discussion.
INDIVIDUAL FEEDBACK
Following the group discussion everyone had the chance to quickly talk about their WordPress site and their own objects. There were 16 of us so understandably time was limited to 10 minutes each – which is still 3 hours of critique. We overshot by half an hour in the end, but it was encouraging to see how everyone was respectful and stayed until the end unless they had something specific to go to. I was sad that ANN felt unwell at the start of the class and had to leave as I know she put a lot of effort into her shells and overcame some technical problems.
Please forgive me if you read this and I have not used a correct pronoun for you.  SASKIA started us off with her mushrooms. She found working in a digital environment challenging, but as with all her work she presented some very careful photography and placed her objects in her garden for context. I have a good camera and for the future I must make better use of it rather than relying on grabbing a quick image with my phone. DALE was as meticulous as ever in her work – an icosa-creature of a hippo emerging from a twenty-faced three-dimensional polygon. The organic creature and the angular object were a great juxtaposition.  I love GEO’s work. I am in the color perception class with Geo and their work is right up there at a professional level. Geo had been unwell and didn’t complete a plywood assemblage but put all their energy into making a large minotaur-like figure. The hybrid creature concept came up in several other designs. The minotaur was in sliced format and had a dense muscular feel to it. Geo couldn’t resist embellishing it with some earrings and a nose ring. MELANIE told us how terrified she had originally been of the shop equipment, but her confidence grew. I work all the time with construction equipment and have friends who have lost fingers or have had other bad injuries, so I completely understand that. The bandsaw is great as the blade only moves in a vertical direction, which means that there is less chance of kick-back – I would never put my hands within two inches of my table saw.  At first her objects looked abstract, but when she explained they were scans of herself holding her camera it all became obvious. She was surprised, as I was, that while the interlocking cardboard was not as dense as the sliced plywood it actually represented the camera better. PAM had a very personal story to relate how her “dog” hand gesture was a link between herself and her dad, as their dog had recently passed away. I like Pam’s art and also the fact that she has some interesting and often quirky feedback that she provides us with in critique, which gets us to look at things from a different perspective. SAMANTHA’s hand was the star of the show for me. Its light and airy open feel created a very minimalistic representation – sometimes it’s the space that does the work. Reminds me of Laurie Andersons song – Its not the bullet that kills you (it’s the hole). In case anyone in class is reading this and is not familiar with it this is a hyperlink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zA6LL78KYU. MADYSON told us that in creating her bears she wanted to make something “doable and something I want to see myself”. She made bears for her soon-to-be-arriving nephews. Madyson was brave enough to say she was proud of herself, something that we don’t say often enough, and that she also had a lot of fun. Sounds like a great approach to art to me, simple and fun. KEELEY told us of her woes with mesh mixer which apparently had a personal vendetta against her. Calliope, rather than being the Muse who presides over eloquence and epic poetry, in this case was a guinea pig and flying fish hybrid. LOUISA’s work was a family affair. Her son wanted a little fat pony and her daughter wanted a dragon. And Louisa, as ever, delivered both really well. Louisa had cheerfully overcome a raft of technical problems including the curse of the red lines from slicer. But just because the computer said it couldn’t be done, that did not deter her, we all need to learn from that. CARSYN often has a unique approach to an assignment in her art and this time was no exception. Her barnacle creation combined plywood and cardboard into one holistic piece. Angela described it as potentially being a maquette, which was term I had almost forgotten not having heard it for years, a steppingstone or preliminary design for something else to follow. SHAWNA used mesh mixer as a design tool in creating her crystal object. It had a surreal feel to it, reminding me of ruins emerging from the Cambodian jungle. SCARLETTE found making her piece calming, like working with LEGO, and it had a great tactile feel to it. It was clear from her smiles that the work had taken her to a happy place. ABBY somehow drew inspiration from elongating a circle in mesh mixer into creating two whale shark models. Her choice of slice angle really brought the fish to life. TORR is another person who pushes the boundaries in his art. Torr’s tomb in slices and painted grey had a very graveyard feel to it whereas the interlocking cardboard version reminded us of the rotting hull of a ship resting on the seabed. Last to present was RUMOUR. Rumour had made two versions of their high heeled boots, one with several mesh mixer embellishments. They were working on assembling the parts right through the critique and were finished in the nick of time. Somehow one of the boots had taken on that floppy quality that you find with leather that had been worn for years.
And so that’s it for critique. Thanks everyone.
Random examples from the many I took, chosen because they were the least blurry photos, rather than any other reason – sorry I have so many bad photos!!!