Ancient Chinese jade-hunters floating-needle compass

Pitt Rivers project

Photos from the making of my model for the exhibition project at Brookes for the Pitt  Rivers museum in Oxford.  The title is 'Space and Time'.  I was inspired by the compasses and sundials in the museum and the museum of the history of science, so decided to do a piece about  ancient Chinese compasses.  This wooden fish will be the float for a magnetised needle that will be placed in the jar above.  Because it's magnetised, the needle will make the fish point south in the water.  On the outside of the jar are illustrations, two are signs of the zodiac, and all are linked to star constellations.  Each represents a point of the compass according to the Chinese.  It is a very basic, early form of navigation discovered by the Chinese 2000 BC, originally used to align houses, graves and crops to Feng Shui principles.  When it's finished, the bottle/jar will hang from a chain so it can be worn around the neck.

Melting, take 2

Transformation and morphing project second and final photoshoot.

Morphing& Transformation

2 week applied art project.  These ice keys were created from a vinamold of my flat key.  These images explore the idea of the fragility of possession.

Christmas Cards

Attempts at illustrationy christmas cards.  With lots of holly.

Layers Sketchbook

A few pages from our most recent sketchbook project called  'layers'.

Leaf Skeleton

Elective project week, helping us decide between two specialties for out final pathway.   This is my work from the 3D elective pathway.  Our brief was 'natural forms' inspired, I was interested in leaf skeletons and human skeletons, so decided to create something with a mixture of the two. A literal leaf skeleton!  The bones are made from delicate air-dry clay and painted with acrylic, strung together with copper wire.

Pistachios

A necklace I made in the first 3D week long project.  Our brief was to make a piece of jewellery out of scrap or recycled materials.  I had a cupboard full of pistachio nuts, and always thought the shells were such a waste, so they were the ideal media this week :) Dyed blue with brusho and stuck onto cardboard packaging using a glue gun.

mini projects

A1 sheets from the day long drawing project we did in the first few weeks of the course.  Done using a variety of materials such as biro, pencil, ink, wax crayons and colour pencils.

 Photographs for a visual communication project. We had to fill in the statement 'my name is....and I...'. I decided to go with 'My name is Holly and when I was younger the fairies wrote me letters'. The child drawn in white is meant to show the girl as her younger self, reading a letter. It was drawn on using a graphics tablet linked to photoshop. The final photo is one of the final worked over photos.

Jar

Photograph of the jar of objects I used to create abstracted paintings from.