Ivana Shantilal
Secondary school has made me realise just how much I am devoted to Art.
Culturally significant Indian and Western elements are the essence of my art work and growing up in Portugal has helped me grasp the contrasts between these two very distinct cultural worlds. I have tried to explore this theme through several media, including linoleum carving, printing into clay, copper plate etching, casting and mixed media.
Although my work is representative in nature, I have recently become
engaged in different forms of pattern- making. I have some experience in textile-processing and computer aided design, but I want to develop these skills further.
I aim to gain a broader awareness and understanding of Art, exploring new boundaries and challenging my own preconceptions.
Joana Freitas
My work has mainly been about the imposed theme from the beginning of the IB, Structures and Environments. This was the starting point for all my pieces during the course; however the theme developed in different ways, generating completely different art pieces. Structures
and Environments have come to represent the context of my life; the
background which surrounds me, the way in which both nature and the city are influential in my life. I have experimented with a range of media & techniques in the course including sculpture, painting in oil & acrylic, printmaking (including lino carving and copper plate etching) and life drawing but the most engaging and innovative technique was casting using clay and plaster.
Researching various artists and movements was essential in developing my work, the most influential of which were Vieira da Silva, Wyndham Lewis, David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Rachel Whiteread. Although they all have completely
different styles and significance for me, I found elements in their work that
related to my ideas, some having similar starting points (Vieira da Silva and
David Hockney) and some relating more to the final results of my pieces (Wyndham Lewis and Rachel Whiteread).
My inspiration and the developing phase of my ideas come through
photographing and recording what surrounds me. I then develop these ideas and transform them into something concrete, often making the best out of my mistakes. Some pieces were developed quite
effortlessly while others were a struggle, many processes having to be repeated and changed in order for the piece to be successful. As a young artist, I believe that learning from mistakes is determinant in the development of future work.
Julie Myck
My work is built around the ideas of ambiguity and nature. After looking at Land art and site-specific installation, I became interested in Andy Goldsworthy, especially his use of structures and colour. His creation of time-based works, which heighten the experience of viewing nature, were very interesting to me and became the inspiration for one of my main projects.
My work entitled, ‘Apples’ is a piece in which I cast ceramic apples and hung them in the branches of a tree. My apples strongly resemble natural ones but will not
degrade over time. My idea was to integrate a man-made object into nature, thus
representing the modern, materialistic world we live in and how we attempt to
re-create and control nature around us. As the tree and environment change over time, the apples will remain unchanged creating an unnatural and unsettling reality.
Creating 50 apples was not easy, thus I had to find an efficient and fairly quick
process to make them. I made molds of 3 different apples of different sizes and pressed clay into these molds. I was left with two halves of each apple, which meant that then I had to carefully push these pieces together and make sure they were well attached. Eventually, my process went from 25 / 30 minutes per apple, to about 10 / 15 minutes per apple. The most difficult part of the process was glazing the apples. If the apple was not fired at exactly the right temperature, with the precise amount of glaze, it would come out with bubbles, no shine or a dark brown colour. About 10 apples were ruined because of the glaze. It was a strange chemistry, which even after glazing 50 apples, I was not fully able to understand!
I have documented the tree over time in order to show the way in which nature changes while the apples remain the same. I have found myself taking risks and trying out new techniques and ideas with more independence. The visual arts course and my project on apples have helped me to become more open minded and changed the way I understand art as well as what I perceive to be art.
Maria Ramos
I take a special interest in architectural structures and this is evident throughout my artwork. My aim is to capture the timeless essence of a construction, in the hopes that the pieces evoke a sense of power and elegance. I strive to communicate a sense of the development
of cities and the growth of industry, as well as some of the materialistic qualities found in humanity. These themes are personally significant, for they underline my own concerns for the environment and the way in which buildings should live in harmony with their surroundings.
I have tended to work in large scale only because it captures more successfully the overall magnitude of constructions. However, the relatively small etching prints depict the fragility of the environment and how architecture shouldn’t rise above nature but coexist in a harmonious balance. The sculptures have been more of a challenge, for I had hoped to construct relatively flawless pieces but even though the final result wasn’t perfect, it proposed the idea that artificiality is not welcomed in the human environment. The choice of white was intended to suggest innocence and fragility.
For the sculpture piece, I experimented with casting; however, there is no particular process that I feel more
connected to. I often draw with the traditional lead pencil because I feel it captures best the antiquity and delicacy of some constructions. Learning the technique of copper etching has allowed me to generate fine lines that can create both organic and linear forms.
As a source for research, I have used photography to develop my more architectural work. Visits to Lisbon, Berlin and Gredos (Spain) have permitted me to do series of sketches that I have then used as a basis for creating final pieces. In sculpture, I have developed my pieces more through experimentation with materials, which presents the freedom to create abstract forms and helps me to clarify my sentiments. Life drawing classes have given me the opportunity to study the organic forms of the human body not present in traditional architecture.
Calatrava’s fluidity of architectural forms and the way in which that parallels natural profiles has been a focus for my work while the work of Rachel Whiteread has offered a healthy contrast to Calatrava’s organic shapes. However, present in both is the element of purity that
attracts me greatly. Giovanni Piranesi and the Portuguese artist Vieira da Silva have inspired me through their use of delicate line, evoking calmness and supremacy. I was also stimulated by Wayne Thiebaud’s and David Hockney’s technical skills in painting. For me, their use of vivid colours represents our material world and consumerism.
My mixed media piece was a culmination of the techniques of pinhole photography, monotype and drawing for which my intent was to express the harmony between nature and civilization. The hardest piece to complete was the large pencil drawing, merely due to the sheer size and detail. The IB Visual Arts Course has allowed me to gain knowledge in new techniques and be able to pursue my interests freely with no constraints on the thematic focus, therefore, allowing me to enjoy working on pieces with which I feel a deep connection.
Miguel Cummins
My main objective is to create an impact on the viewer, to make them react and feel something about what they are looking at. My work is successful if it makes the viewer stand back and think twice about what it is that I am trying to say. They may ask themselves if there is more behind my thought process for the sculpture or painting than what is initially apparent or if in fact it is simply what they see before them. I have focused on art movements that transmit unusual or abstract ideas, but not necessarily through representational depictions.
I try to make the aesthetic give form to the idea and this may lead me to a more abstract response. Looking at different artwork and movements helped me form my ideas and my decision making was very much based on creating uncertainty in my work. I mostly tried to choose materials that I was not familiar with and this made the process more interesting. As I explored new mediums I discovered unexpected solutions.
Salvador Marques Taylor
The main theme around which I have been developing my work began
with structures, more specifically, the structure of stairs. I became
interested in how to communicate the idea of stairs without showing the actual structure after seeing a sculpture by.....Once I became interested in stairs I started noticing that nearly everywhere you look you can spot a flight of stairs. I studied the many stairs that I encountered and used pinhole photography to capture and document them. I worked with cyanotype to create images and then developed an image for a copper plate etching from the photographs. I am interested in the quality of line which can be
created through the use of dry point and etching and found that the
possibility of creating prints which could be developed in series fit my needs and interests. These initial works inspired by stairs led to my looking at feet. I realized that the presence of stairs could be implied by positioning feet
as if they were climbing the stairs even in the absence of the stairs
themselves. Another artist who I found inspiring and who deals with this notion of absence in her work is Cornelia Parker. I began trying to create pieces which dealt with the subjectivity of what the position of a foot can communicate about its environment and context. I wanted to make more feet so began experimenting with casting and sculpting materials such as plaster, mod rock, alginate and porcelain. I discovered that cast porcelain captured the details and the history of the foot through the many lines and cracks on the surface. The feet led to the need to explore ways to depict movement and light which took me back into 2D media such as painting in acrylic and oil as well as photography. And my feet have taken me full circle.
I make art because it is an amazing relief to be able to express myself
using signifiers that are not words. Expression is not necessarily about making my work communicate what I feel. It is sometimes just expression for the sake of it – like with the line drawings that are incorporated into many of my pieces where the my pen moves across the surface without me having
any conscious sense of what it is that I am creating. It is as if I am just making complex doodles as a way of releasing the complicated turmoil of
emotions that are swirling around inside me. However with some of my work I do intend to communicate ideas and issues that I believe to be
important. With my surrealist compositions, behind my choice to juxtapose separate, often representational objects within the same piece was a rationale where I felt that that approach was the most effective way aesthetically of expressing the point I had to make about issues like our perception of beauty or our perception of reality.
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Ricardo Valentim
“ESPAÇO-TEMPO E OUTRAS COISAS”
- Site Specific/Work-in progress (Fevereiro-Março)
“[...] Olhamos um quadro de onde um pintor nos contempla. Essa ténue linha de visibilidade envolve em troca, toda uma rede complexa de incertezas, de
trocas e de evasivas. Nós estamos no lugar do seu motivo. Nós, espectadores,
estamos em excesso. Acolhidos sob esse olhar, somos por ele expulsos,
substituidos por aquilo que desde sempre se encontrava lá, antes de nós: o próprio modelo. Mas, inversamente, o olhar do pintor, dirigido para fora do quadro, aceita tantos modelos quantos espectadores lhe apareçam.”
In As palavras e as coisas, de Michel Foucault
Esta instalação veicula uma série de ciclos de acontecimentos cujos registos físicos e mentais pretendem servir de dispositivo para uma descoberta activa de significados e de sensações. O conjunto destes registos, entendidos como inscrições, é a história de um lugar itinerante que leva consigo as convergências do percurso.
A soma de experiências possíveis e a hipótese de projectar uma memória, mantêm em aberto a nossa existência.
A redundância é contrariada pela ampliação de possibilidades e o sentido indeterminado e impermanente reflecte o carácter transitório do processo.
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