Deconstruction workshop with Nick Deakin
The last process and production lesson of the year was with Nick and it was about deconstruction and portraits. Nick had photocopies of our ID photo on A4 and handed them out and told us to deconstruct them in any way we wanted. I decided to slice my photo into strips and then I laid them out on A3 paper. I positioned the strips so that my face became all jumbled up. He then told us to draw our reconstruction with black pen. Mine looked a bit crazy because of how my face was positioned but it was fun to see the out come.
Next, we photocopied our faces. Nick got us to put our faces onto the scanner and scan them! I put my face on and this was the outcome, it really emphasizes how chubby my cheeks are!
The task was to again deconstruct this portrait in our own way. I decided to cut up my face into triangles, big triangles in the center and smaller ones on the outside fading into the black, almost like they disperse and and shatter.
Time was running out so I could not cut up my whole face, therefore I decided to try something out. I placed the original photocopy that had a large cut out from all the triangles I had cut out of it, on top of the collage. This actually looked really cool, it almost looked like I was wearing a mask. Some sections were too blank though so I filled them in with more triangles to fill the gaps. I then glued the images together and cut the overall art work size down.
I was happy with how it looked and was rather different to everyone else's. Nick also really liked it and it made it onto the wall of the best pieces of the workshop, and on the #HUDGDA Instagram!
The final activity was to use different concentrated dot pages to create a portrait of ourselves referencing from the ID photos Nick previously provided. The dots reminded me of pop art so I decided to not make it realistic and have a bit of fun with it. The final piece ended up not really looking like me, but an alien alter ego of me called Cassandra who has anteners...
Overall I enjoyed this workshop as I am currently researching collage and deconstruction for my own brief so it was quite helpful. It was also fun to look at everyone else produced at the end and the diversity of work.
