4th- 7th March 2023

materials workshop:

What was the process of decision making when selecting a material to work with?

When deciding what material to create my experiments with, I decided to reflect on what has worked well for me in the past and a practice that I want to develop. In part two, the 'narrative flux' project really intrigued me to explore further because of the technique of screen printing (photo-emulsion) and the layout of the illustration book. I chose to create a concertina book of an old Hindu mythology story for my experiment this week- the vision Yashoda had of seeing the world in Krishna's mouth. I am excited to see how the screen prints will turn out; I want to try and use two colours, combine writing into my book to tell the story, and create multiple copies which I will place in libraries, bookstores, etc.

What where the limitations of working with the material? In your opinion, did that help / hinder your work?

Later in the week, I realise that I wanted to do a screen-print upon fabric and turn that into a sari. I wanted to combine another element of Indian mythology and Indian culture within my work so I decided fabric would be an interesting material to print on and test an experiment with. There was some limitations working with very thin fabric: the ink would often seep through to the other side, and I had to make sure not to get the previous print smudged while creating a new line of print. I don't think the obstacles helped in my work, I think it slowed the process down but I was still very happy with the end result.

Is there any material you would like to try next or develop further?

While making a sari, I didn't actually use fabric that often used to create sari's, I used very meshy, kind of thick, coarse fabric. I am going to find some old saris with a more smoother surface that I can print these Indian mythology stories upon and see how it stays with actual Indian fabric. The reason I decided to start printing on fabrics and turning it into clothes is because that is another way to expose the public to Indian mythology stories. Rather than going the ordinary route of creating a book or creating a film that captivates people I love the concept of creating clothes that people will question: what is the pattern? What does it mean? And do they find it interesting?

What actions for moving the project forward have emerged from what you have done so far?

Like I mentioned earlier, experimentation with fabrics and clothing is definitely something I want to pursue in this project. During this week of experimentations, I have created an outcome of both a concertina book as well as a screen print outfit. I definitely want to pursue screenprinting more, since it is something that I enjoy doing and I feel like it's one of my strong skills that I've developed from part one of this course. I still want to do some more experiments within different materials and different ways of working, such as filmmaking, and from this I can do a self evaluation and see what works best for me and then continue to develop that style of working.

Self-conducted print studio day:

Today I created the positives for my photo emotion screenprint. I started by drawing on my pattern of my story on A5 paper and tracing it upon the plastic and creating a stencil within the screen. I did some experiments about what colours I thought would work and a major part of my story is about how the world was found in krishna's mouth, so I decided to use blue, green and black for my colour palette for this concertina book. On the first day of printing, I did blue and green prints. I printed the green colour using a stencil rather than a positive because I wanted to capture a slightly sharper edge and more finer details within my book. Reflecting on my work, I think that I could've paid more close attention to detail because some of my sections where I wanted it to be green, ended up shifting and didn't look as good as I had it in my head. For next time, I think making sure that my work is in the exact right position and the right way around will definitely help in making sure my work is as effective as it can be.

Reflections- Part 3

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