# 5

lisson gallery

we have now moved onto fashion/textiles. for our first lesson we were asked to think about objects that compress and expand. an immediate thought relating to both textiles and compression and expansion was the works of the fashion designer hussein chalayan. luckily enough, he was holding an exhibition at the lisson gallery that i managed to visit. "i am sad layla" featured many installation pieces, including film, photography, audio, performance and sculpture. this minimalistic show had quite an eery feel to it, even at the entrance. a ghostly song was sung in turkish (chalayan's aim was to explore his culture and heritage). this song was a key piece to the whole exhibition. linked to it was a life size sculpture of the singer, which was made from a 3D scan of her body. her face was then projected and moved on the body, but it was silent.

we were asked to produce a series of 9 photos in sequences of an object being compressed or expanded. i chose a can. these were then put aside until the end of the week, whilst we worked on drawings of installations we created in groups.

with the rest of our compress/expand materials that we brought in, we were asked to make an installation out of them and were given short drawing exercises to do.

 

going back to the 9 images, we were given various tasks to complete. first we had to experiment with the words cut, fold, slide. then detach, reattach. displace, replace. deface. multiples, scale, enlarge, reduce and finally connect, families. my favourite example was deface; connect and families. i enjoyed scratching into the photograph of the can, to make it appear like something completely different. 

we then had to turn over our photographs, and copy the image we saw on the back in various types of paper. we had to consider the change of scale, weight, multiples, and change of surface. the backs of my photographs were quite boring!! so i decided to link up 2 of my photographs, and to copy their combined back images onto different pieces of paper.