Author: LARA ARTIST DESIGNER MAKER

As a result of my pitch my focus for the next week is to adjust my age demographic and target market to a more focused age group of 30-45.

Making more of a focus on the story and the processes that make the paper special and desirable for the customer, pushing the luxurious elements within the products making amendments to the products and ranges to exaggerate the hand made bespoke elements to attract a demographic.

I need to consider where these products would sell and what occasions I need identify to make these sell and what would make people purchase these products.

I have identified the customer demographic for my products being between the ages of 25-50, These people typically spend their time in coffee shops, shopping in high streets enjoys plants and gardening and regularly visit garden centres and boutique shops. They enjoy the finer things in life are plentiful with their expenditure. They enjoy branded high end items such as Barbour. They want a luxury product they can use and enjoy that has durability and uniqueness.

I wanted a logo that represents the products, I have decided to call the brand “The Crafted Paper Company.”

I experimented with fonts to identify a font that fits the luxury of my products and compliments the quality of the paper and the ingredients within it.

During the marketing workshop we explored ways in which we would promote our brands and products considering the customer type, who they are, where they would be and the best way to capture the ideal customers attention. I feel the interest behind my product is due to the eco hand made qualities, this would be a good aspect for a marketing scheme to make people aware of how the product is made and how it is more friendly for the environment, I am hoping this would increase interest, and encourage people to purchase because of the background story (this is a unique selling point). For marketing purposes I would make business cards and a poster to promote my brand.

Now that I have my book binding and paper making business idea, my focus has been on researching.

After the lectures my key business values to consider include:
innovation, evolving with the time, physical or online, what will it look like in 2 years time, demand, gaps in the market, individuality, small scale equipment cost.

My business involves producing hand made and rolled paper and creating products that are bound by hand:
flower pressed paper, sketchbooks, notebooks, wedding/ phonebooks, gift tags, wrap, prints, cards stationary, paper making kits.

Eventually building up a clientele business where customers can come to me and I can customise a product to suit there needs, such as wedding invitations etc. Branching into embossing and letter pressing.

These will each be unique and can be personalised and bespoke, I believe these products will be desirable on the market as they are a quality, luxury item that is eco conscious that can be for personal use as well as gifts.

 

 

This week introduced me to the fundamentals of business. Motivations, skills and business needs knowledge are important factors to consider as well as how your selling for example online, selling to shops and on market stalls.

My motivations: political, artistic, working from home, small scale, one off pieces, quality  products, craft and middle to low price.

while forming my identity and concepts it is important to consider:
customer, brand identity, competition, prices, marketing.

Our first task was to form a scotch tape product that relates ‘the jester’ brand identity, this product was to be used for a night out… our first thoughts were to create a funny product that would useful for a niche market. The product, a tape to tuck junk up. aimed at drag queens and an alternative market. I found our brand poster task helped the ideas fall in place as the comical advertising helped to explain the product. this task was helpful for this reason and the fast paced research and team based activity helped think more creatively during the day.

My Concept
My ideas accumulate existing and developing skills of mine, using paper making and book binding to create unique hand made sketchbooks that are eco friendly.

At this point I am undecided whether this would be a workshop based product where I would be providing a service or a product based business, there is flexibility to consider both options within the same business and run them both side by side.

I came into this project with limited knowledge of forming from the figure, life drawing and figurative context. Although it has always been something I am interested so it was important to me to picked this field as it would be a chance to expand my knowledge and crafting skills. It did! The contextual lectures allowed me to expand and learn by having new influences and a historical understanding. I particularly found this helpful when making a presentation as being shown artist examples inspired me to delve deeper and discover more for myself.

The wide scope of workshops challenged and expanded my skill set and I have now banked new techniques that I can further progress with. it was helpful having these making workshops as the 1 to 1 support and techniques were very helpful. Having the chance to work from life drawing has been really helpful not only to understand the proportions of the figure but also to gain a bigger understanding of clay and applying similar techniques and behaviours it was interesting to compare and contrast the clay to how skin behaves. although at first I found it a little weird having the life drawing session where we held a pose, this session helped me understand the stresses and tensions that the body goes through but also this was helpful for me as I started to communicate and understand these stresses within my own work.

I enjoyed the group aspects of this project and under taking the final embodies encounters task I was able to come at it from a new perspective and consider and play with new understandings and provoking feelings to create and experience by using mixed medias. I really enjoyed working as a group although this is not always the easiest thing as people have differing views and it challenges communication skills, I don’t often get a chance to do it very often but it was interesting how our worked pulled together with similar understanding and ideas, we all had a similar interest with exploring in the realms of wax and the resistance when combined with clay. This outcome explored the tactile nature of fabric and how the composition changed state over time similarly to skin and the fragility of the materials through cracking and ripping. it was interesting having a group conversation as it was helpful to understand other people’s thought processes through this activity and some really interesting narratives arose from it.

Moving on from this project I have developed a real interest in the human form and figurative modelling and it is something I am keen to pursue further. learning initially about the ageing, damaged bodies and inside out I have become interested in attraction and repulsion and how these can be communicated in order to make the audience feel a connection or discomfort, this idea interests me as challenging this could throw up some interesting outcomes.

figurative field presetation PDF

 

key words and phrases from the session that interested me. We explained our embodies experience work to our group…

Inbetween, reality, unconscious, dissolving, tripe, embodied experience, transition, repelling, pivotal point, repel, absorb, pull, stretch materials, material values, interaction, beads of sweat, dripping, finer details, documentation, living changing capacity, changing state of material, ephemeral, permanent, membrane, cracking, seeping, oozing, bleeding material, texture comparisons with skin, tangible qualities, neriour system, the body as a container, absorbent surfaces, analogies with absorbed water in hands wrinkles when wet, swelling ankles, fragility with age, changes of the skin, disease process, bodies consumed during illness, fragility, repelling repulsive, body as a shell, interiors and personalities stay the same, integral similarities with the qualities of clay, time frames in humanity, understandings of immortality, autobiographical elements, attune to language of of material, tuning into a material within the interactions of the person with the clay, empathy understandings, mechanisms of interaction, humans from time frames of mortality, timescales, moral dilemma of materials, reduce, reuse and recycle, capturing a moment in time, what will happen to these once the session is over? reusable fabrics? wasted, material empathy, taking aspects of the body, sense of becoming, empathy.

I loved this workshop! this was a totally new experience for me I have never worked in this way considering an all round feeling or experienced for the viewer. Expressing ideas, qualities and feelings. we discussed as a group the key interests to evoke during this exercise, what we are interested in showing and what our favourite firms from the  workshops were.

(I have no photo evidence from the plaster workshop using the fabric moulds as it was very messy and I was too emerged in the workshop to remember to take pictures of my foot and hand. we first made fabric moulds by drawing, then using the sewing machine to sew around the shapes to create a ‘pocket’ for the plaster to sit in. These images were taken the morning of this workshop once the forms had set and solidified into held positions, I curled my fingers of the hand to create a more interesting composition.)

we started my manipulating and ripping the fabric from our plaster forms this became an interesting discussion of making an ephemeral nature of skin was resembled within the fabric, so we wanted to give the form permanence by stiffening the fabric using wax.

I  bound my plaster hand within a pair of tights and use mixed mediums to submerge peel and rip the form to create connotations of damaged skin and revealing layers of the body, bandaging and repairing broken skin. I have had operations where I have felt like I’ve been torn apart and sewn and pulled back together.

we wanted to bring the forms together so we experimented by dipping the resources given to us (wool fabric, lace fabric and knit) to create these “tripe” like forms that when these fabrics were dipped in wax then submerged in slip repelled each other forming this spinal tripe skin like quality. these we hung to intertwine with the placed hands.

This was an interesting exercise to undertake after having claire’s lecture where she spoke about the unconscious mind as we felt as a group we were making things to play and explore not necessarily knowing the final outcome by pulling similarities and ideas around as we were working.

 

 

 

 

 

The most prominent part of learning about Claire’s practice and artistic interests was her work discovering the unconscious mind and how you can be making work not necessarily knowing what it is you are making or why you are making it, she explained it is okay to not to know. she compared this to the film “Close Encounters Of The Third kind” where the character unconsciously has the urge to make a huge mountain structure, unaware that what he is unconsciously sculpting already exists and he has been inspired but is oblivious to what it is he is making until he sees it on tv.

Sachs, B. (2019). Close Encounters of the Third Kind remains an uncanny mix of globalist optimism and private horror. [online] Chicago Reader. Available at: https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2017/09/05/close-encounters-of-the-third-kind-remains-an-uncanny-mix-of-globalist-optimism-and-private-horror [Accessed 9 Dec. 2019].

This links to her practice where she explained how she had an interview over one of her pieces of work; a large tree like structure, she didn’t know why she made it but it became the elephant in the room during the interview as it wasn’t spoken about. claire explained then how she didn’t know why she made it.

Claire Curneen’s work shown to us in the lecture

The idea of unconscious creations is rather lovely as it allows the artist to make freely without having any barriers or avoidance. similarly to this idea, Jean Arp figuratively sculpts unconsciously creating “organic abstractions.” These pieces created by Arp are named prior to there creation to avoid influence during the making process of the conscious mind.

Winged Being’, Jean Arp (Hans Arp), 1961 | Tate. [online] Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/arp-winged-being-t02007 [Accessed 9 Dec. 2019].