Our Last Week: Attempts at Art

Our final week in Nottingham focused almost entirely on the creation of our final projects for our culminating exhibition.  They'd been alluding to this terrifying event for the whole four weeks, but only now did it begin to loom visibly on the horizon.  By Friday, we had to come up with (and then pull off) some display-able something, preferably to do with our experience in the UK.  It was a pretty open ended assignment, just the kind that sends students like Katie and I (and probably a few of the others) into fits of worry about whether or not we’re doing it right.  Gavin oversaw our efforts in the same stifling room as the previous week, reassuring us that we could indeed create something resembling art, and it could even be good art!

Since I tend to favor words over illustration, I began my project with the idea for a fairytale based on various parts of the city’s history.  Throughout our time in Nottingham, our tutors and tour guides kept using the phrase “city of lace” to describe the local pride in their once-famed textile industry.  It made me wonder – what if there were literally a city made of lace?  The fairytale aspect spiraled from there, combining with an earlier idea to write an origin myth for the Left Lion as a Nottingham meeting place and eventually becoming a symbolic short story incorporating a number of my favorite pieces of Notts history.

The story (mostly) completed, now all I had to do was…the actual display part.

Although I had plenty of ideas in my head for how the text could interact with images, I knew I tended to have trouble translating such visions onto the page.  I had already made cutouts of local landmarks and spray painted them to look like lace for last week’s project, so I wanted to incorporate those somehow to save myself a bit of work.  Another Revolution Monday (of involuntary volunteering) and the following Tuesday and Wednesday passed without much progress on the actual creation front.  I mostly just revised my story and batted ideas around.

Having finally decided to do a sort of panoramic scene of my story’s setting and obtained the materials for the project, I devoted Thursday to nothing but work.  I had a little too much fun hammering wire into the desired shapes, became increasingly frustrated with my interesting but ridiculously time-consuming idea to create sandstone out of glued threads, and printed new, smaller versions of last week’s lacy landmarks when they proved to be absurdly large next to my developing illustration.  Eventually, while the rest of the group went water skiing (which I would have only observed anyway), I glued down the final pieces of my project and stomped home to shower and relax, having worked so long on it that I wanted nothing more than to tear it up into tiny shreds and shower the exhibition with its destructive confetti.

Our week also included a final session with Sean, in which we discussed horror archetypes and then wrote a quick draft of our own scary stories.  My sister later dubbed my concept for the story particularly creepy, even for me, but I rather like it and will probably continue to develop it independently.

And then Friday dawned - our final day in Nottingham - which deserves its own post!

UPDATE:  I forgot to write about Wednesday!  Our friend Andy from our first week was back in town for his graduation, so he tracked us down for lunch at Thea Caffea, a tea room Bhav recommended our second week.  After lunch we had to get back to working on our projects, but we made plans to meet up after our evening activity.  This activity was a tour of the Nottingham Contemporary, led by our student ambassador Lauren (who actually does work at the Contemporary).  After that, we opted not to attend a talk at the museum in favor of food and rest.  Andy and his lovely girlfriend met us at the Pitcher and Piano for dinner, after which we all went mini-golfing.  I even got a few holes in one!  Then, sadly, we had to say goodbye to Andy for good.