References and Influences

Thought I'd create a post showing any influences on this body of work I feel I may have missed out in the rest of the posts!..

looking at the webpage of Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber. On their page I found several essays that had been written as critiques of their work and explained the qualities that made it stand out. I found a great deal of very useful info and several passages that really helped me understand what it was I was trying to do with my own work.

 Lori Nix clarifies that she is a photographer above all else, although is only behind a camera maybe once or twice a year, with each miniature taking around 6-7 months to build, Nix did not see herself as a sculptor, in fact, after completing each model she scraps them entirely, this would also come to be an important discovery in my work as I intend for these models to be viewed only through print when completed and slowly aged step by step.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZh3Oi7d0q0&t=56s

http://www.lorinix.net/essays-1

"Pictures enable us to imagine some thing as something – in the sense of a scene. This is made possible through the alternation of closeness and distance – and is also valid for experiences in extreme situations, such as a disaster or even the Apocalypse"

As I like to use photography and with my study in to the Japanese sense of space earlier in the year, this was a great passage to come across.

"Scenarios are neither forecasts nor visions of the future, but analytical explorations of possibilities" - Eva Horn

 This is written in to the same article but is a quote from a German author who is a lecturer at the University of Vienna, from her book 'The Future as a disaster'. It helped me realise I wasn't trying to be factually accurate but just descriptive in my understanding of a series of possibilities.

However these were images of a future setting that looked at the city after humans had gone extinct, I wasn't so interested in this as a root study/focus and so deepened my search still.

I also found that another British comedian was a great help, James Acaster. He wrote a book called 'Perfect Sound, Whatever'. About the music from 2016, which he names as, undeniably the best year for music ever. He proceeds to try and prove this through the course of the book by naming overlooked musicians that released an album in 2016 and describing the processes some went through in making their work. Beyond finding some amazing background music to work to, I also found these descriptions of processes quite useful in some cases, so much so that I tried playing around with similar ideas in my own work, I'm not sure anything concrete came from it but it certainly helped with productivity in a time that I might've struggled otherwise, so grateful for it all the same.

This was brilliantly helpful, at times when I was getting disconnected from what I was doing I would read a chapter and find similarities between what I was doing, how I was working and so many of the artists in the book.

Other Artists Work

Amy Bennett, I won't say that this work was a driving inspiration throughout the project as I was only introduced to her Instagram @amybennettstudio a short while ago by John but it is a great example of what I'm trying to do here, build miniatures to be viewed in 2-dimensions Amy Bennett works with models to then paint from.

Animation is something I do love and how space is built in it fascinates me. This is some background art from a recent release called Dorohedoro. Was super helpful to see how sci-fi cityscapes were built in a 2-dimensional format.

A lot more films but thought another worth mentioning was Andrei Tarkovsky' The Stalker was really worth a mention. Not my usual taste in science fiction cinema but knowing it was filmed almost entirely in an abondoned factory site I think somewhere in Estonia, it did help me realise that wires and far fetched futuristic imagery isn't all that when creating a convincing science fiction setting.