Tracey Emin Monoprints

 Born in Croydon in 1963, Tracey Emin is an English contemporary artist who is known for her extremely confessional and autobiographical work. She works in a variety of mediums such as drawing, painting, film, sculpture, neon text, embroidery and photography. I also looked at her monoprints which she produced many of. These prints are quite simple, containing very loose scribbled lines and simple subjects, with some being almost like diary entries. The monoprints are quite interesting as they look almost childlike in their execution, so I think it would be nice for the children to experiment with it. Emin keeps the subject of her monoprints right in the centre and very simple, this would be a good technique to teach the children as their image or message can be seen clearly and understood. The Crescent Primary School students are already doing some form of printing which they enjoy however they haven't done mono printing yet so this will be a good activity for them to expand their skills while also not being too hard for them. The only real issues with mono printing would be mess, which can be dealt with by using aprons and washing off any ink afterwards.

Tuesday 28th June 2016

Creating a proposal

 

The Arts Council is an organisation that provide funding for the arts. A lot of the free galleries we go to art funded by the arts council. They aim to invest £1.1 billion of government money around £700 mil into helping to create art and cultural experiences between 2015-2018. You can also apply for jobs/volunteer through the Arts Council website.
To get funding for an arts project, you need to create a proposal for what you plan to do with the funding and give a detailed overview of your project. The Arts Council website can be used if you need funding for a project, and below are some art trusts you can also contact for funding:

Wellcome Trust

Jerwood Charitable foundation
Princes Trust

Lottery Trust

The Elephant Trust

Leverhume trust

Artsquest

Welcome Europe

Local Councils

Art Wales

Arts and Humanities Research Council
The Tate

Paul Hamlyn Foundation
http://www.rakshapatel.co.uk/index.php
http://www.victoriarance.com/

As part of our project we had to create a proposal for what we are going to do with our community partners in this project. Each member of our group focused on a certain part of the proposal and we came together to edit it and present it to the teachers and other classmates. We also presented it to our community partner.
I had to write about the time scales part of the proposal, covering these questions : How  long will it take to organise? How long will it take to plan? How long will the workshops last? Do you need to factor in any extra time?

I did an original draft which was then revised when talking to Matthew, my annotations show the revisions we had to make and we got new potential workshop dates from teacher Matthew Lamptey.

Each member of our group wrote and talked about a section of the proposal
1. Title of project- The whole group came up with this
2. Define proposed project- Tyreis
3. Summary of audience- Shahla
4. Time scales- Me and Jennifer
5. Costs- Maya K
6. Materials- Maya B
7. What problems may occur?(risk assessment)-Louisa
8. Team members, roles and experiences- Millie 
9. Past examples- Amber and Grace
10. Blaise and Jasmine  
 

This is a summary of all the different parts of the proposal.

For our introduction we thought it would be nice to put a quote from one of the students who came to the earlier workshop. The quote is a response from when we asked the student why he liked drawing and art.

This was revised from our first draft, where we thought we would only be working with Year 4, and we also found out we'd be working with a smaller group rather than the group of 30 we'd expected.



We were able to talk a bit more in depth about our community partner by referencing the workshop we had earlier that day which gave us something to personalise our proposal and talk about what working with the students was like. Overall the students really liked their time at our school and we also had a lot of fun hosting the workshop and getting them more familiar with creating art.

 

Feedback from the teachers about our proposal:

 

Everyone in the group spoke clearly and explained their topic well.

We needed to go into more detail about individual parts of the proposal , some were too vague such as define your proposed project.  

Some parts were a bit rushed, this is due to the fact that we had to prepare our workshop and have a first draft ready to propose to Matthew which we then had to edit again, which was a lot to do in a short period of time. If we were to do it again we would plan better in advance, making sure we could get everything done to a high standard.

The title could be more inventive to make our project more personalised and unique.  

They really liked the quote we put from one of the students at the beginning of the presentation and we explained our philosophy behind our workshops well

A lot of art subjects are being cut by the government, so our project is really nice opportunity to engage young kids with art at a time where arts are being restricted so much in this country.

Tuesday 28 June 2016
First Workshop

We had our first workshop with the Crescent Primary School students at our School and also presented our first draft of our proposal to teacher Matthew Lamptey. This workshop was meant to be introductory, getting to know the children and letting them more or less experiment with materials however they wanted. Before they came, we put out a variety of different drawing and painting materials and covered a large table with a big sheet of paper for the children to work on. For the first half the of the workshop we split our group in half, so Me and Maya spoke with Matthew about the proposal and the rest of the group began the workshop, took photographs, supervised the children and asked them questions. The workshop began with us letting the children choose from the materials we set out and drawing whatever they wanted onto the paper for a short period of time, as a warm up exercise. After this we started to ask the children what culture means to them, gave them a new sheet of paper and had them draw in response to culture. This resulted in the children drawing flags as this was likely the simplest way they could understand their culture. They drew flags from the countries their parents and family were from, and it was really nice to see the mixture of all the different flags showing the range of countries the students were descended from. After this we asked the students what they liked and didn't like about the workshop and told them our ideas for what we would do in our next workshop, which we decided in the meeting would be focused around printing.

The children said that they enjoyed their time in the workshop and liked the first task of drawing freely more than the second task where we gave them a topic. This might be because when we asked them to draw from their culture they weren't entirely sure what culture meant,  which means we will need to explain the concept in a simpler way next time. The workshop also needed a bit more structure, even though it was introductory we could've set the students a few more tasks to keep them focused and on track. To move forward, we will be using new materials, something along the lines of mono printing, screen printing or using stencils. As screen printing is quite complicated and time consuming to set up, we weren't sure if that would be suitable for the children and creating stencils would've also been time consuming to design and make, so mono printing would likely be the best option going forward.