I attended a lecture by Rebecca Gouldson today with most of the first year applied art students and brought a fair few second year and a couple of third year students too. It was really worthwhile actually and I got a lot out of it. She described her journey from degree to today and the problems as well as the successes within her practice. She is a metal crafts person and although she started making vessels, she moved towards wall panels using etching to apply an image. I really like the work she showed and was privileged enough to have one of two brochures she brought with her to keep.
Later on after lunch, I noticed a sign up on the staff room door about booking a tutorial with her, which I took full advantage of! She came to my studio space and I talked through and showed all my work this year. As she has a background in metal, I showed her my metal silhouette base for the lamp I made last semester which she was impressed with, and also my recycled can flowers. I described my modules to her briefly and showed my responses but as I am still unsure as to my final piece for Friday, I asked her technical advice on an idea I came up with while talking to her. She was clearly my inspiration at that moment in time, and so I explained that in my first year at uni (as a glass maker) I used copper wire for drawing with and enclosing within my glass work. I explained that a test I had previously done to try to sculpt the wire into a drawn figure like my sketches were unsuccessful. I had previously used very thin copper wire and using a cardboard box with pins stuck into it, I used these to form around in the shape of a figure. This test however failed as when I removed the wire, it had sprung back slightly, deforming the piece which I didn’t want. She explained how I might get around that by using a thicker wire and annealing it first to make it more malleable and easy to work with and using pliers.
I am going to attempt this as a test hopefully in the short space of time we have left!