Le flaneur et son chien Central Park, Plymouth’s largest city park, lies on my doorstep. It is a place I visit every day to walk my dog, and so is one which is very familiar to me. For this exercise I decided to take photos on my phone as I wandered, seeing what emerged and …
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Creative Arts Relations Project 1, exercise 2: Relations with the wider world
Reflecting on how my creative pursuits relate to the wider world, I am aware of two distinct themes: how my art is a response to the world, and how my non-creative arts work both feeds and is fed by my writing, film-making, composing and drawing. My ‘day job’ is as an Organisational Development (OD) manager …
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Creative Arts Relations Project 1 Exercise 1: Alternative Forms
Whilst the new requirements of this degree course encompass various artforms, I still regard myself primarily as a film student. Writing, filming, editing, scoring – these are the disciplines in which I’m keen to develop my skills and are the reason for my taking this degree. So if there’s an opportunity to combine these with …
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Creative Arts 2.1: Creative Arts Relations. Learning log, opening thoughts.
The very first question I am prompted to consider is one with which I have wrestled for some considerable time: does having multiple disciplines diminish or enhance my engagement with each discipline? Through my whole life (barring the first five years, when I didn’t have a piano) I have been equally obsessed with making music, …
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Creative Arts Today part five: Assignment 5
Chosen subject: Sainsbury ‘sail’ store canopy design by Peter Rice & Martin Manning, completed in 1994 Plymouth, in the county of Devon, has a long association with the Royal Navy and its links to Drake, the Mayflower and others are well known. So when supermarket giant J. Sainsbury built a new superstore on the banks …
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Creative Arts Today part five, project 4: Enveloping the body
Exercise 1: an iconic fashion image. The fashion image I have chosen to analyse is the Little Black Dress, or LBD, originally designed by Coco Chanel in 1920s. Previously, black dresses were worn only by women in mourning, but Coco Chanel, ever the innovator, created the dress described as Chanel’s ‘Ford’ (referring to the Model …
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Creative Arts Today part five, project 3: clouds and pillars
Exercise 1: the function of textiles Marianne Straub’s textiles, as used in the London Underground network, are so familiar to the London commuter as to be part of the fabric of working life. What may go unnoticed by many is how carefully the designer thought out – and trialled – her designs. Marianne Straub believed …
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Creative Arts Today part five, project 2: the revival of craft and the hand-made
Exercise 1: the case for hand-made objects What is a craft? To me, it is something done or made with specific, manual skill. This may be an object, like a carving, a tapestry or a sculpture, or it may be the skill to make something ephemeral, like a film. In either case, it is something …
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Creative Arts Today part five, project 1: The life cycle of textiles and materials
Exercise 1: sustainability As the old hymn goes, ‘You don’t need two shirts to your back’. Yet today’s fast fashion tells us that we absolutely must have this season’s latest styles and can’t be seen in what we wore last year. But is there a price to this textile consumerism? According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacturing) , …
Creative Arts Today part four, project 3: A sense of place
To some extent (i.e. within the range of the lens), a photographer chooses what is seen within the frame and what is left outside, even in a landscape. But I think that one of the most important aspects of any photograph is its focus – not how sharp the image is, but where it leads …
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Simon Elvin Creative Arts Today 