Second Year LOLz

Well its that time again, back to yer news feeds being wrecked with my blog posts especially when it's assessment time!

Back to college now almost 2 weeks and officially studying Printmaking.  The first week was nice and easy, with lots of introductions and meeting our new tutors Sercan and Martin.  Sercan is our main printmaking tutor and Martin will be doing Photography and Multimedia with us.  As well as that, I've started studying "The Moving Image" as my seminar course so will be learning lots about Film over the next 2 semesters so lots of LOLz ahead no doubt.

For our first project of second year, we are split into two groups with one group (mine) doing Lithography and the other group doing Intaglio.  From there we were given our project briefs and titles.  My delightful title is "Spaces, Structures and Systems: abstraction and figuration help build new worlds."  Now to say i was "shtumped" was pretty accurate.  After a long summer break of having my brain in relaxed mode, trying to get my head around this one was pretty hard.

A lot of brainstorming had to be done before I eventually got a moment of inspiration whilst day dreaming.  I decided to look at the structure of today's society.  With Ireland in the midst of one of the worst recessions in history, its fair to say that most people are being affected.  So from there, i looked at the political side of society what with the Government being one of the main causes for the mess we're in.

There is an inequality in today's society that led me to explore further.  Hard working men and women are being taxed up to their eyeballs with vital resources and services such as medical cards being taken from then whilst another part of society is living it up without a care in the world, little or no tax to pay and crazy one off payments that could feed and clothe the standard family for a substantial amount of time.

As a result of this unfairness and hardship, people who were once high flying successful workers are forced to sleep rough on the streets; others reduced to a life dependant on alcohol, drugs, stealing etc just to survive.

But you dont even have to go that extreme for an example.  Look closer to home.  Students everyday are being threatened with ever increasing College Fees as well as the Grant being cut or even completely taken away.  Without this vital funding, young people arent going to be able to educate themselves therefore there wont be anyone to help get this country out of the hole that its in.

So, for these reasons, i've been playing around with images of homelessness, alcoholism, prostitution etc before i will decide on my final image and composition for my Lithograph.  To say that Lithography is a long and confusing process is not an understatement.  So much has to be done to prepare the stones before you can even begin putting your image together.  We have started filing down the limestone blocks to make them smooth and cleaning them with materials like Carborundum and the likes.

It will be a long process but with the project itself only lasting for a short time I really need to get cracking!  Have no idea where this will end up but hopefully preparing the stones will be done by next week so the printing can start :)