From typography to paper…back in “practice”

Pathway teaching has begun at AIVA and from the 21 students enrolled, I have 6 for Visual Communication…however zero for Fine Art. That is actually quite the norm as most students apply from design backgrounds…most wanting to do Jewellery with Lisa Juen. The first module for the 4 pre-MA and 2-BA Viscom students is type design…basically typography…design your own typeface…for the pre-MA students on the thematic of “TIME” and for the pre-BA students it is more about experimentation with media rather than theme. Through teaching this, it has actually made me fall in love with my practice again…nothing like being in a creative atmosphere to feed your own creativity. A sketchpad has reappeared…ideas are being notes, scraps of inspiration taped in, words of influence noted. My practice is BACK as before it was lost in PhD land somewhere…actually, I should say PhD land kidnapped it for a while and therefore, it was ignored…although I did start the ‘Words Are All We Have’ book arts project that’s still in “motion” as such. Apparently that was back in February…and it is somehow already November. I must get back on top of this project by next year. I must say Lisa has been a great encouragement too…so thank you Lisa! Here is what has inspired me so far this week…in no particular order…

There were two typographic works that particularly caught my eye…the first one being ’emotional book/书语’ by Shansan Art&Design. There is a video of the typographic performance online here…for some reason I don’t think I can embed it in this blog post. Here are some stills to show you their work…it made me very happy.

The other was a series of works by Petros Varnava called ‘What is Identity?’…a typeface created from fingerprints linked to illustrations. I think they are quite witty and distinct. Varnava states he completed research for this project by asking the public to fill in questionnaires about his identity so he could discover…

“…how people observe my individuality with the use of certain characterisations. The research required to provide a word for each letter of the English alphabet which depicts a characterisation of my personality. The replies I received were somehow amusing, yet it made me think how people really see me. I was quite surprised that most of them were actually true. Some of the characterisations I received as replies were describing my identity as I believe it is. Therefore the answer to the above question is both.

Identity is something that can be shifted. However it cannot be changed.” – Petros Varnava

Also today, I came across this TED talk where artist Béatrice Coron creates intricate worlds, cities and countries, heavens and hells with paper and scissors. I actually wrote about her in a previous blog post in January this year before she did her TED talk in March. She comes onstage in a glorious cape cut from Tyvek – a tough, durable non-woven material with a similar appearance to paper, but with the flexibility of fabric…strong, lightweight, and resistant to water. In this talk, she describes her creative process and the way in which her stories develop “from snips and slices”. This is definitely something to show my Visual Communication students during the book design and paper engineering module they will be doing in December 2011 to January 2012.