Advanced Studio Practice - Proposal

In my last project I was process-led, focused on reigniting my artistic practice, and exploring facilities that were previously out of my reach. Within this project, I plan to explore and focus on deeper and more complex concepts, whilst still maintaining my visual, illustrative style that I have developed over a number of years.

I have a working title for the project:

Nature and The Landscape: Reimagining, Fusing and Playing with Reality

I will broadly explore my fascination with nature and the landscape. I'm interested in it's unique yet human-reflective aspects, such as life cycles and behaviours, separate and connected. I hope to explore my ideas using my interest in physics, space, reality, and sensory perception. These elements can trigger emotional responses that cause feelings of familiarity, calm, and possibility.

I hope to frame my exploration with these three subjects I am interested in, of which have inspired my love for nature and the landscape.

• Nature and the landscape (Chosen subject)

• Video games

• Everyday life

I intend to explore my love for all three and fuse them together, creating unique ideas that play with reality, lead with a fun curiosity, and reflect my personal understanding of the world around me.

I will continue with my illustrative style I have developed over the years, as my practice is more illustration than 'Fine Art' based. I'm looking at many illustrators, artists, and designers, and further inspiration, to help contextualise my style, and explore how I can represent nature in other materials, and with specific chosen subjects. My fascination of tactile and textural objects makes me wonder about the potential of materials, specifically clay and wood. Kim Hono, a Japanese/Korean ceramicist, is a great example, who creates child-like, imaginative, designs inspired by his rural youth in Seto, Aichi.

Kim Hono, 'Seeds and My Moment' exhibition, 2024

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"He treats clay as a canvas for the play of his brush: surface treatments encompass rugged monochromatic finishes, multi-coloured abstract designs, whimsical line drawings, and motifs from the natural world."

Daiichi Arts, 2024, Available at: https://www.daiichiarts.com/artists/79-kim-hono/overview/ [Date accessed 25th April 2024]

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Specific questions I will be asking include:

How does my idea of a place, an object, or feeling, change with my personal experience and understanding?

What is the potential of my chosen interests, specifically fusing them together, and what will that look like?

The landscape is nostalgic to me, being brought up in a rural-surrounding town and county, and have many fun memories spent outside in nature, as a child and adult. I love the colours, textures, and sounds that reflect human behaviours and create mindfulness. Nature can encourage a simple life and slow-living, but look deeper, and you will find life that is complex, unpredictable, yet reflective, and reinforces subconscious behaviours. What's interesting, is that I arguably became more mindful of this, from playing multiple video games (Another one of my interests).

I have played video game since my youth, and the most memorable ones have extensively-developed worlds, landscapes, and lore to experience and explore. They reflected my love of much nature and the outdoors, which in my 20s I finally understood and put both interests together. I'm therefore interested in how video games develop worlds using digital tools, and how they can be replicated in the real world, creating a playful and otherworldly representation, which reflects emotions felt within the environment.

Find the full project proposal below.