Creative Review 01/12

For our Creative Review session this month (takes place on the first Thursday of every month) I have brought an article from December's issue (2011) of Creative Review. The article is titled 'Cut, fold, glue and play'. I chose this article to talk about because during the last project we were asked to produce an A3 3D paper engineered model of our chosen bug, which I personally really struggled with. Usually my work is all 2D mainly painted but with some collage emerging here and there, so working off the page can be tricky. I don’t really possess the ability to construct paper models myself without having to create something with a child audience in mind. The article talks about how paper models and toys are becoming increasingly popular in the illustrative world and the one’s it features are exceedingly good. Basically I was trying to get some hints and tips for my own work and maybe some research pointers as it’s not an area I’ve worked in before.

Book wise I chose to show John Le Carré’s ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ 1974 spy novel as I can’t get hold of the film just yet (release date not until January 2012). It is a useful read to get some context for the Little White Lies competition I’m currently working on. I presume that the film would be a much quicker way to brush up my knowledge on the content but unfortunately I’m too early for the DVD and too late for the cinema unless I trek to Edinburgh (that would be an expensive viewing!)

Recently, I took a trip to the Tate gallery in Liverpool to look at the Alice in Wonderland exhibition so this featured in my presentation, but also some exhibitions that I think will be interesting for future visits. The Manchester Art Gallery has currently for an exhibition on ‘Under That Cloud’ which looks interesting, it’s a showcase of jewellery that was produced by travellers stuck in Mexico City during last years Ash Cloud epidemic and is running from 19/11/11 – 15/04/12.

For my film I chose to present the Black Swan which is another film in the shortlist for the Little White Lies competition. I chose to view this recently to see if I could find another film that was available on DVD so I could use more content in my work rather than the Tinker, Tailor film which I’m struggling to find. My plan failed… miserably. I found the film to be a psychoanalytical thriller – not my bag, sorry.