My project as it stands

As per my study plan, in which I come up with a character and create the costume for the character, I had a bit of time trying to come up with a character and a concept I should work on. I had decided I wanted to make the character fairly different to my own personal self, so it would therefore show a difference in sense of body, personality, behaviour, etc.etc. I decided the character should be a boy, given that it is opposite my gender, they would be in a position of power – as I am not in a position of power, and due to the fact that I enjoy history, I felt that I would like the character to have a historical basis for their being. Originally I had decided that I wanted the character to be based in the military in the regency-era – around about the period of the Napoleonic Wars, 1806-ish up to 1815. This is because I wanted to make a costume I would enjoy to work on, and I have a particular love for the military uniforms of this era. I have done a lot of research into the historical period before this project and was trying to decide between making a uniform based on a real uniform, or to re-interpret it to suit my own character-world which I wished to base it off.

The picture on the left was a made-up design, based off a Austrian military officer uniform, but interpreted in my own way. The picture on the right is a design from a later-period photograph of a British Hussar – I have a particular fondness for the somewhat eccentric designs o f Hussar uniforms from any period, and especially like the addition of the fur lining. I prefer the Hussar uniform, however, one concern for me was whether or not in the video projects I would be doing in Phase 3 of the project, would it eventually mean that I would have to find a horse for the videos?

Based off Austrian Napoleonic Regimental designs.

Based off a British Hussar Regimental uniform.

In the end however, I decided that I would perhaps like to make a character from a period of history I do not know much about, as I wanted to learn more about costume from certain periods, and I have made several uniforms from the Napoleonic War era already.

After much consideration I came up with the decision to make a costume from the Jacobean era, as I had an idea for a character which I felt would be interesting to research for and develop via videos, which would be interesting to me, but might also be useful and insightful to people watching the videos. I have decided to make a character who is a Jacobean stage actor, who specifically plays the parts of women on stage. This would therefore be helpful considering as much as I make myself look masculine, I will be unable to change my voice convincingly to sound male, yet part of the reason these actors played women, was because their voices had not broken, and sounded quite high and feminine. I also felt making a costume from this period would be new, interesting and experimental, as I have never made a Jacobean costume before.

I am visiting The Globe in London on the 23^rd of March to have a look through their costume department and hopefully do some research into the actors of the period. If possible I will take some photos to help me work out some designs for a costume, which I will hopefully be able to work on once I return from research purposes. As well as this I hope to gain further insight into actors who played women parts, society’s views on them, whether there is an issue with gender and gender representation and so on. If possible, I may even take a look at some of the female costumes they would wear, and if I have time, I may indeed make an additional female costume of a part that my character might be performing on stage, and appear in one of the videos as this actor character performing this female character on stage.

I feel the various levels of play at hand as well as gender variation confusion and play would be interesting to look at and discover, and I think it would be interesting to see if people who asked me questions on my video on Phase 3 would maybe ask me questions relating to my own personal gender, or the character’s gender.

Currently I have numerous books in which I am researching early views of drag, early theatre, Jacobean theatre, costume of the period, gender and society’s views and actors of the time who played these particular parts. The collective research will be added at a later date, I have chosen not to go too in-depth at the moment until after my visit to the Globe, as I do not want my costume and character design fixed and unchanged while I go and unearth further research which will be gained from my visits to the Globe and numerous other places with archives.

Group Led Response to Presentations [22nd March]

[I have been very busy in the past two weeks, working on filming for a BBC Pilot, and other such work, so my updates to this blog have been few and far between.]

Personally I feel the presentation responses to the work related to us are a bit of a waste of time, in total we would have taken out at least five Tuesday’s worth of work and spent that time working on the response presentations. One of those Tuesdays is wasted entirely on planning the response presentations which could instead be spent working on our actual personal projects – which personally I think would be a much better use of time. Due to this well-known thought that I know is not just my own, we, as a group decided to make the presentation as simple as possible because we did not want to waste too much time and effort on it when we could be working on our own work and projects.

So we tried to come up with a simple response to the work we were given in the previous weeks, consisting of responses to the work given to us in previous weeks. Gathering together it was suggested that perhaps we do something interesting with masks; because masks are something we can wear to hide identity, and distort people’s perspectives and interpretation of people and things. We came up with the concept of wearing blank masks, and having people draw faces on them as a way of distorting body and also as a way of representing portrait, as essentially people are creating a portrait of the masks on our faces. We decided to develop this further by wearing black clothing to try and make ourselves look more like a blank canvas, to try and blank out some further parts of our character and to try to encourage people to make our character.  Additionally we all tried to wear tights on our head to cover up our hair, to blank ourselves even more, so we had no hair distracting people in trying to make us appear as a different character. As well as having people draw on our white masks to create expressions, we also thought to bring in various items of clothing, props and accessories to allow people to further create a character while using our bodies essentially as a canvas.

On the day I brought a collection of wigs, an orange, brown, and white one as it seemed like hair is a good way to show character, and would be interesting to see how people played with the wigs, if they decided to style them, how they placed them on the head or not. I also bought a trilby hat, a blue scarf, a pair of large headphones and two sets of glasses for people to put on us and play with. I thought the collection would be enough for people to have a go at creating different characters and see quite where they decided to go with the portraits they were creating. We put all the items in two boxes in front of ourselves, with a collection of paint and pens next to a sign that said ‘Create your own character’. Once we had all the masks and tights on we all posed in a circle in various heights and positions on the circular bench outside the library and waited to see what happened.

While we were setting up, there were lots of other BA students on the campus in the area watching us prepare, they were laughing and watching curiously, but none of them dared move over to see or ask as to what we were doing. We had one gentleman come over and read the sign, but he did not start to join in, which was a shame, as it would have been interesting to see if people not involved in the MA course would have a go and get involved with the presentation. Finally when the group all gathered, people instantly seemed to gather as to what they needed to do. We had to stand still unless people moved us so I could not see what other people were dressing most people like. It was funny though as I think I was one of the last people that people decided to start work on, so I watched the rest of the group getting dressed up first. I had a raincoat pulled on top of me first of all, which was funny as I was asked to put my arms through the arm holes and guided to put it on properly. I thought it was interesting that the first thing people did was put the clothes on us all first, as a group, I believe it was expected that people would draw our faces first, and then dress us accordingly to how we had our masks painted. Instead it was the other way around, which I felt was an interesting observation. I also found it funny how people would eventually go around and swap which character they were working on. So I had someone place a wig on me, then another person would appear and replace it with a different wig. Similarly, someone put a hat on my head, then someone else would return and said “I don’t like that hat” and replaced it with a different one. I thought everyone was very funny, it was interesting to see people responding as to what other people had done to each person. I would have lots of people coming to me and going “Oh gosh that’s scary” but of course I couldn’t see what people had drawn so I have no idea quite how ‘scary’ I looked or not.

I thought it was interesting to see how people played with the items we had brought as well, I know one of the wigs placed on my head was put on backwards, while for a brief time another was put in the hood of the raincoat, and someone tied a long scarf around my hand, and eventually had the end going down my top. Strangely enough, no one really changed my position at all, in fact it would get to the point where people would move my arms to try and put on an item, and then position me back to how I was originally. We had discussed in our meeting the week before that we should allow the group to move us into any positions they wanted, but as a far as I gathered from the little vision I had through the mask, it seemed like few people chose to do this.

It was mentioned in the response that it seemed we had a circle of at least two types of spectators. We had the interactive spectators of the MA students getting involved, creating their characters and portraits and so on, while similarly, they themselves were being observed by the rest of the BA students in the area on campus. We had some members of the MA students while also getting involved, would also be taking photographs and videos of the presentation , so there in essence would be a third group of spectators who would watch the presentation as a third party viewer.

Generally I feel it was a fairly effective presentation in response to the work we had been given, that was fun for all involved, yet also – thankfully – required little effort on our part. As technically, the original spectators – the MA students were part of the artwork as they were almost more involved than we were, we were just the canvas for their work.

Frances Tempest. Costume Design for Film. Forum. [March 1st. 2011]

I have been rather busy over the past week, so have been unable to update the blog until now.

Due to the fact I did not have an industry liaison, it was suggested I attend Frances Tempest’s forum on Tuesday 1^st of March which was specifically based on Costume Design in Film. I am desperate to work in the film industry, I gained a First Class Honours degree in Film last year, and I had taken this MA in Costume as another way in which to get me into the film industry, considering that so many people are trying to do the same thing as me. Hence, I figured that if I was able to do multiple jobs, ie. Camera operator, sound operator, direction, editing, lighting, costume making, costume design etc. I might perhaps have a shot at getting a job in one of these areas in the industry. However, my knowledge of costume design in regards to film was severely limited. I had experienced costume making in the theatre during a two-week work experience at Glyndebourne Opera House, however, I quickly came to realise that the making department was not for me. But costume design was different from costume making, I just did not exactly know the significant differences between the two, so I felt like the forum would perhaps be a good idea to attend on more than just a liaison point of view.

Frances Tempest came across as very nice, friendly, and above all knowledgeable. She spoke about her current, on-going project called “Conversations with Costume Designers”. The project, involving recorded interviews with various costume designers of the past six decades sounded very interesting, however I was quickly disappointed to discover that the work was not finished – so I would be unable to access it – and similarly we would be unable to hear any extracts from the interviews due to a lack of technical skill. We were given quotes from the interviews, though unfortunately these were few and far between.

What she did state however was very interesting to me, mentioning little anecdotes from various people including; Julie Harris, Bob Ringwood, John Bloomfield and so on. It was interesting to get a glimpse of how the role of a costume designer has changed, while similarly making it clear the difference between a costume designer and a costume maker and also pointing out the pros and cons of being a costume designer in general – I would like to think that after this forum, should I get a job as a costume designer I will not accept the lack of credit costume designers seem to apparently be so calm about accepting. If I design something, I would specifically want people to be aware of this fact. I was also pleased to hear that for people like me who do not have a significantly good skill at drawing can instead present their ideas and costumes in another way, such as via a mood board or other presentations. As long as what your idea may be is clear and described well, it can be presented in any way you want.

These bits of information were very useful, however, I would have liked to know more about how one goes about getting into the film industry in the first place, as this is my prime objective the instant my time on the MA course ends. However, I have always considered the job as a costume designer as more of a back-up option should I be unable to get a job as a runner or camera operator. However, I will keep Frances Tempest in mind, should I need to contact her about access to the industry.

The Body

I know this week is supposed to be about ‘Body’ and one would think that the body is relevant to most practices that people are taking. However, it seems these presentations are instead a chance for all the professors’ to parade around, showing everyone their particular projects without considering its relevance or use to the group presentations at the end of the three-week period.

At the beginning of the presentation Stephanie even openly stated that she “does not do the body” at which point, I felt as though I wanted to just stand up and ask ‘why are you even bothering to do this presentation then?’. Half the time it feels like those presenting were asked just because those were the people free on the day, and in actual fact they have no understanding or knowledge about the actual topic being discussed on the day. Stephanie’s work specifically related to boobs in response to the Russell-Coates museum. It just seemed like a big photographic collection of all the boobs she had made or found boobs in things. Like a very Freud-related process. But she didn’t seem to explain why she had done this response. It seemed rather pointless as if she has just gone; ‘oh this looks like a boob, and I bet I could make that look like a boob, and if I do this it will look like a boob!’ There was no reasoning behind it, there was no ‘why’ it just didn’t feel like she was going anywhere, or knew why she was doing what she was doing. It was pretty unimpressive in that respect. As usual, there was no explanation as to how this relates to our particular practices. It was far too general – these things always seem to be far too general or far too specific to one particular practice – frankly the MA groups should be split so people can learn and respond to things that are actually relevant to their practices.

Lisa Richardson seemed to make her work try and be more ‘in your face’ making sure everyone was quite aware of why she made something. But it seemed even less-related to the body than Stephanie’s work. Certainly, Lisa made use of the body in her work, but that is the point, she used the body instead of talked about it. She was very aggressive in stating what her work symbolised, even though in most instances I felt as though what she was stating was not obvious or clear in her work. For example she stated her work was meant to connect with Victorian-inspired family paintings – which I felt was not evident in her work at all. Trying to be feminist, but at the same time trying to be like: I’M FEMANIST BUT I’M USING FEMANINE-RELATED THINGS! CAN YOU SEE THE IRONY?!!! It was quite annoying, and she seemed to try and press the issue onto the class. But as with the others, it again seemed irrelevant to our individual practices. Perhaps it will suit the fine artists and maybe a couple of the photographers who are dealing with a human form – but apart from that it felt irrelevant again, and I have no idea how this is going to help any of us with our group presentations unless we decide to prance around outside with placenta’s on our heads.

Feminist art seems to be an underlying theme between both aspects. I don’t think either Stephanie or Lisa realised this, which is pretty frustrating – though Lisa pretty much states that hers is feminist art, her defence supports her feminist theory.

Dave Hazel can introduce a presentation in a good kind of way! Huzzah! A presentation which makes me want to sit up and pay some attention! ‘Art, death and photography’. I even wrote notes!:

• ·         Quantum entanglement – a belief that there is an energy that surrounds the body for another half an hour or so to create a weird look surrounding the corpse. Has apparently been photographed.
• ·         Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (by Mary Roach) weighing of the soul, book. Check out amazon.com!
• ·         ‘Every photograph of a human being is an image of the dead or those who will die’ Roland Barthes.
• ·         We are not exposed to death anymore. It is sanitised. Why is that…?
• ·         Death is inevitable but frequently avoided by image-makers. The ‘final’ photograph is no longer prevalent in family albums. Her photographs, in addition to being evidence of the human condition, are aesthetically pleasing allowing the viewer to linger and reflect without feeling uneasy. Maeve Berry explores this visual void, demystifying and stripping back all material trappings – bones laid bare to reveal beauty in the thing that we fear the most.’ Diemar/Noble PHOTOGRAPHY
• ·         Www.paulfrecker.com – Victorian death photography: “a means of capturing the image of the person in one last futile gesture that denies their loss whilst at the same time admitting it totally.”
• ·         Joel Peter Witkin – Drivers from the morgue make runs everyday in white trucks to pick up the dead. When found, the bodies are just thrown on the gurneys, face down. Their noses get broken. The trucks are loaded with maybe sic people, and they just lie on top of each other, somewhat bloated. They’re all stretched out. Their identities are taken, their clothes are taken away, and records are kept. When I stayed those extra days in Mexico, I knew something was going to happen. I got a call. Four men were picked up, the last run, on the last day before I was going to leave…’
• ·         Joel Peter Witkin ‘Feast of Fools’
• ·         “The organisation and  experience of death have become increasingly privatised” Chris Shilling
• ·         Julia Kristeva, ‘Powers of Horror’ – “The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit, sewage, even the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk.”
• ·         Chris Townsend. Art and Death (I.B.Tauris, 2008), Modernism and Death: The Body, The Spectre and Modernity (University of Leuven Press, 2011).
• ·         Henry Peach Robinson – ‘Fading Away 1858’. Staged photograph of death.

He managed to talk to people and make a bit more of a discussion instead of talking directly to us; he got people to add their own points and information on certain matters, as well as their own thoughts – THIS IS HOW YOU DO A PROPER PRESENTATION TO THE GROUP! WHY CAN’T ANYONE ELSE DO THIS? He was very interesting, discussing how it made him feel as well as other people, not stressing his own opinions on it but instead asking other people how they felt on the matter. He would show photographs that felt a little more relevant and discussed the subject matter in an interesting way that made people want to pay attention. He did not use his own project, but instead his interest in the matter of death, photography and art.

I really enjoyed the final part based on the idea of ‘the body’ and death. Mostly because I find the concept of death very interesting. My GCSE art topic was based on ‘beneath the surface’, while other people focused their work on plants and things underground, I instead looked at things beneath the surface of the body, such as the inside of deer carcasses, chicken carcasses, etc. Perhaps I might add some information about death in my work… I need to have a good think and see if there is a connection I can work with.

Site/Place/Industry

I felt that last week’s presentation for our group practice on site/place/industry as being pretty useless in helping us learn anything new, comprehend its relevance to our individual courses/projects and generally found myself to be bored, uninterested and ended up blanking most of everything that was mentioned. This was due to Ronnie’s presentation skills (or lack thereof). On his discussion of ‘site’ he proceeded to talk about one single location that seemed to be only relevant to those photography students. He kept discussing architecture and quite frankly this felt completely irrelevant to my particular practice in costume. Similarly, his way of presenting did not help with the lack of relevance, considering he spent a majority of time reading huge paragraphs and pages from text books without stating its significant relevance to anything. By the end I felt bored, uninterested and unfulfilled. Quite simply it felt like I had wasted that part of the day.  Similarly, whatever the second gentleman spoke about in regards to place I had completely blanked it because I felt it was again, completely irrelevant to my practice – it was not pointed out or stated at any point how whatever he spoke about would be relevant to what on earth I’m doing. Again, the final gentleman who spoke about Asian fashion as art – it is technically about clothes, so I perked up thinking finally something was going to be relevant to my project. But it instantly seemed I was mistaken as it seemed again, pointless and irrelevant to my practice.  The topic was vaguely interesting, but I felt as though it was not helping anyone consider the topic of site/place/industry, it didn’t fit with the topic of ‘industry’ even though that apparently was what he was discussing. In fact it felt like something completely different, but as to what it was, no one was quite sure.

Quite frankly the entire day felt like a waste of time. Nothing seemed relevant to anything, it was boring and the professors’ presentation skills lacked any actual skill. In my year one undergraduate degree we were taught the ‘dos and don’ts’ of presenting to a class, and quite simply all of those presenting – especially Ronnie – did everything you shouldn’t. They read out of books, they copied huge chunks of text onto the powerpoint board, showed pictures without defining their relevance to anything. I get increasingly frustrated at these sessions because they seem completely pointless.