Three areas of investigation to choose from: vessel, puzzle, flatpack. The brief's purpose is to give a starting point to an investigation. The idea is to explore the theme in an open ended way. There is no expectation of anything finished. The investigation is the point of this brief.

My first thoughts on the brief were fairly loose. My first instinct was to take it in a very fine art direction. I think I felt a bit trapped by having to choose one of three options, albeit very loose options. I am determined to leave this course with some skills so developing work using different materials is an exciting prospect. I want something a bit more to get my teeth into though.

Below: Sketchbook pages.

My next thoughts were to use the puzzle/game brief and adapt an idea which has been hanging around for a while...

I have had the idea to make a weather house of some sort, for ages. My ideas go from a straight forward weather house with the man and lady coming out of each door depending on the humidity but using a pair of houses from a housing estate, to a really technically comlpex wall mounted house which displays the weather from any co-ordinates you choose on a screen behind the house - probably using Google Weather as a feed. I would also like to make a snowdome with similar qualities.

Part of my on going reasearch involves miniatures. I did my Fine Art dissertaion about scale in art and I’ve gone back to reading some of the material I read as part of that. Particularly, Susan Stewart, “On Longing - Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection”. The language inherent in miniature - that of value and desire, preciousness and the idea of using small scale objects to both invite the viewer into viewing something with closer inspection and of acknowledging something far greater, are aspects of the scale model that I’m interested in researching again, in relation to new works.