Experimenting with materials

I wanted to find the perfect material for creating the butterflies out of, as I felt that paper or card was too rigid, but also quite boring (unlike the butterflies themselves). In researching into these materials, I looked at transferring the images that I had created onto different surfaces, to maintain the designs as much as possible even at such a small scale.
Initially I printed onto paper, then glued this down onto the wood using Mod Podge. After it had dried, dampening the paper with water enabled me to remove the paper to leave the print still on the wood. Unfortunately this technique didn't work as well as I had hoped, as the colours turned out very faded and not as vibrant as I wanted them to.
I then found another technique where I used wax paper to print the image onto, then pressed this image onto the wood straight away to transfer the ink. This worked better than the other wood transfer technique, and I really liked the outcome but cutting out the shapes would not be as sleek as I would like.
Another material I used was liquid gel, where I added it onto the printed image, put it in the oven to harden it then after cooling, dampen and wipe away the paper to leave the colour image. Unfortunately again, the colour had not been preserved as much as I would like, leaving only the darker colours on the gel, so I won't be using this for the final butterflies.
My favourite so far is the acetate, as the design is visible from both sides, and all of the colours are maintained. The light weight of the acetate is also a good representation, as it mirrors the fragility of the butterflies and moths, drawing towards the main focus of the exhibition.

Poly-art

After painting and drawing butterflies, I chose to stick with creating my own geometric designs of butterflies and moths using adobe illustrator. This is my first time using it, so it took me a while to get used to the way of working and using the shortcuts, but I really like the effect that you get from using only triangles, giving a three-dimensional and crystal-like finish. The designs are focused on the fragility of the endangered species, and to emphasise to humans that their beauty could be lost forever.

Natural History Museum

I visited the sensational butterflies exhibit to get some first hand photographs of alive butterflies, although these were from Asia, Africa and South America, and I would like to focus on the endangered butterflies that live here in the UK. I particularly like how many of the butterflies have different patterns and colours on one side of the wings to the other, partly as a camouflage, that make them look less colourful when they close up their wings. 

Victorian Collections & The Grant Museum of Zoology

I started off looking into how butterflies were used in the Victorian period, from how they were displayed, to how they were used in objects to create individual pieces such as trays and brooches. Other, more scientific collections were pinned in groups so that they are easy to view and compare.

I also visited the Grant Museum of Zoology, where they had a few butterflies and moths pinned and displayed in small boxes, as it was a very small collection, most of which were encased in different boxes, varying in size and material.

Magnificent Obsessions @ the Barbican

I was drawn to this exhibition after wanting to know what sort of unusual collections artists themselves kept, and if these had an obvious connection to the work that they produce. Having a small collection of turtle figures and other things featuring images of this animal myself, I felt like I could relate to the array of 'knik knaks' like the elephants owned by Peter Blake. The parallels between the artist and their items were sometimes easier to understand than others, but it is hard to fully understand why these artists acquired and saved these objects, photos and the like, without asking them to explain in their own words. 

The first artist that intrigued me on entering the exhibition was Damien Hirst. His 'fascination with the delicate balance between life an death' is not dissimilar to his most famous works, but this enchantment of his also reached out to me as a person, and admirer of animals. The links to the clinical display of Victorian collectors and the lack of sentimentality about the loss of life are powerful and thought-provoking, something that needs to be done to reinforce morals that I feel have somehow been lost in humans that do terrible things such as poaching. Linking to his taxidermied works, the pieces in this exhibition signify his obsession with preventing anything from being affected by time, making it seem immortal whilst also looking into physical decay. 

In the following room, were a mixture of images and Japanese woodblock prints collected by Sol LeWitt. The combination of the vibrant colours of the woodblocks and the black and white modernist photography framed works gave a strong sense of his interests and the way he approached photography. Whilst serving in the US army during the Korean War, LeWitt acquired these nineteenth-century woodblocks from Japan, making these some of the earliest parts of his belongings. I particularly liked the flattened forms that the outlined images create, so would like to explore printmaking further in this project.  This contrasts to his documentation of the architectural details and possessions in his Manhattan loft, arranged in grids of nine square black and white photos.

The collections of some bizarre and beautiful pieces have been described as both addictive and exciting, which is something I feel like I can start to understand myself through sorting out my own belongings. Every item holds memories that are significant to me, so they act as reminders of places I've been to or the people that gave them to me. The idea of collecting items, ranging from art to memorabilia, always seems to be a variety of things that please the eye, maybe not to everyone, but they show the tastes and sometimes even inspiration of what makes us tick as a person or an artist.