My own art practice.

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Colour publication for my ‘Nostalgia’ based project

A post shared by Annelise Turco (@annelisesartwork) on Aug 20, 2018 at 6:29pm PDT

My design practice involves me experimenting with vibrant colours, juxtaposing compositions and most importantly enjoying the process. Favouriting illustration as my best skill, I have selected a mix of work I feel best represents me as a designer. Firstly, I will refer to two publications I have created from 2018-19. My colour palettes always have a base of 5 colours, because I have so much fun with mixing and matching. Something I have become fond of in the last year is texture, and such artists are Louis Lockhart and Tess Smith Roberts have been major influences on me. Lockhart lives and works in an old cotton mill where she creates designs from paper cut outs and line drawings.Roberts is a London based illustrator and print maker. Both Lockhart (Paper Doll, Up My Street, Valentines Prints¹) and Roberts (Street Scene, Telegraph²)artworks ecomaps my favourite thing… Colour! And lots of it. Their attention to detail really strikes me as what I look for in my own art practice. I feel as though it is important for a designer to be one with their work, so personal touches are always really important. 

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Jenny Lewis and Margaret Bruce reflected on something that connects really strongly with me “Because designers are inevitably subject to the ideas and influences of their social context, their designs must reflect their values.³” My value as a designer is to respect myself and the context which I depict. Gender equality and sexual status are things I strongly support, so wherever I can use my practice as a way to define that, I would consider successful. My illustrations tend to have people and figures as I love drawing people. Personalities and styles are great to work with, and I can accompany this with expression through colour. Victor Margolin states “Artworks, no matter what form they take, are primarily discursive.⁴” I love this idea, that being discursive means they can wander. They can be anything I want them to be, and so can the audience who look at it. Like Roberts and Lockhart, I put my work on platforms where I can be seen- a way to be totally free, with so many personalities appreciating my art. This year, I even began to apply my illustration style to handmade clay earrings, and really expressed how colour displays such strong energy when juxtaposed with one another.   

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Much like the Earthworks Poster Collectives ideologies “From the mass media and the use of fluorescent poster inks these works adopt a DIY aesthetic⁵“, I try and replicate a screen-printed look with my artworks through layers of colours. While Roberts and Lockhart use pencil to achieve this effect, I use this as influence and replicate it through both pencil and vector-based images. The idea of the DIY aesthetic again relates back to how I believe it is important to be involved in the design and be recognised for a style on a page and therefore create influence as a designer.  

1. Louise Lockhart, Paper Doll, Up My Street, Valentines Prints, 2019, Mixed media, accessed 9^th April 2019, https://www.instagram.com/theprintedpeanut/
2. Tess Smith Roberts, Street Scene, Telegraph Today, 2019, Mixed Media, accessed 10^thApril 2019, https://www.instagram.com/tesssmithroberts/
3. Bruce, Margaret and Lewis, Jenny. “Women Designers — Is There a Gender Trap?” Design Studies 11, no. 2 (1990): 120.
4. Margolin, Victor. Design Studies: Tasks and Challenges. The Design Journal: Parallels between art and design, 16, no. 4 (2013): 402.
5. Berry, Jess. “Earthworks and Beyond.” Alternative Practices in Design: Queensland collectives 1979-1989: Symposium Proceedings 2010, 2010,190.

Exhibition review, written by Annelise Turco.

Immediately as I entered the Darren Sylvester exhibition, the clinically clean atmosphere was the first thing I observed. Vibrant white walls covered my surroundings, analogously large framed artworks covered the white walls. Sylvester’s exhibition, ‘CARVE A FUTURE, DEVOUR EVERYTHING, BECOME SOMETHING,’ displays his interests in Pop Culture. Whilst the mix of sculptures and large-scale frames superlatively gained most of the audience’s attention, I was drawn to his illuminated dance floor that was booming loud disco music from the end of the exhibition.

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‘For you’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNDQBOQn3UU¹, was a 2013 illuminated dancefloor, reworked on for this current exhibition in 2019. My eyes were drawn to the vibrant neon’s flashing recurrently, constantly juxtaposing with one another and creating a very engaging aesthetic. Without reading the artwork label before entering, I was enchanted in the colours and not sure what I was experiencing- but was enjoying every minute of it. Without the label fixed in my brain, I was left to solve the enigma of what the room meant, “A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason²” Bourdieu statement, contradicts entirely my experience with the dancefloor. I am well educated in art and design, yet without reading the context of the art piece, I would not have assumed it was based on the Yves Saint Laurent’s lipstick collection, embracing its colours through flashing tiles. While Sylvester as a male artist has designed this space for a unisex audience, he was inspired by a well branded lipstick. Pat Kirkham and Judy Attfield suggest that “To gender is not only to code as male or female but also ‘to generate’ – which can, for the purposes of this field of enquiry, be applied to the act of producing meaning³” subconsciously suggesting that if this space were to be gendered as either male or female, it would change the meaning of the atmosphere. In this case, Sylvester’s dancefloor could potentially be labeled to a female disciplinary, and therefore act as a dancefloor for women.

The overwhelming sensations that emerge from the sounded space allow you to be fully amerced and involved. Canadian author Mitchel Canbanac defines a sensation as ‘tridimensional, qualitative, quantitative and effective,⁴” thereby suggesting that the amount of pleasure I experienced in the space was defined by the amount of stimulus I was receiving. Comparatively, Adam Mack positions that “The leaders of the supermarket industry embraced the age-old associations between pleasures of the proximate senses, gustatory desire, and eroticism in marketing⁵” thus identifying that my ability to engage and enjoy Sylvester’s work was due to the way its stimulus was combined with all of my senses and the desire caused by the eroticism in its marketing.   

In conclusion, ‘For you’ was an exhilarating experience provided by my heightened emotions and senses. The wall to wall mirrors, vibrant and neon colours paired with the upbeat disco music successfully ended the exhibition visit and I was quite happy I experienced Sylvester’s approach to showcase Pop Culture, pop music, advertising, cinema and fashion.

1. Darren Sylvester, “Darren Sylvester/Conrad Standish/James Cecil – For You” (Online video), accessed 8^thof April, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNDQBOQn3UU
2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,1984,Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1.
3. Kirkham, P. + Attfield, J. The Gendered Object, Kirkham, P. + Attfield, J. Manchester: Manchester University Press (1996), 4. 
4. Mitchel Canbanac, “Sensory pleasure,” National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S National Library of Medicine, accessed April 6^th2019, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/379894.  
5. Adam Mack, The Senses and Society: The Politics of Good Taste,2006, Oxford, England: Berg Publishers, 87.