JESSICA LEE
BA Hons Illustration with Animation
As an illustrator, I wasn't too sure about how I might fit in to this project, but the brief excited me and I knew that 'Closed Loop' was something that I wanted to be a part of. The freedom to collaborate with students from multiple disciplines and the ability to work on a live brief throughout Unit X has gained me so many new skills and given me a taste of what a future in the creative industry could be like.
INTITIAL IDEAS
WTLGI Entrance
On my first visit to the restaurant my strongest reaction was to the entrance way that customers pass through on arrival. This space, compared to the inside of the restaurant, felt like it needed something in order to tell the customer what this place was really all about when they first arrive.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Visualising produce
Often when I start a project, I find it helpful to begin simply by drawing. I researched into the WTLGI farm and its produce. IÂ began to create drawings illustrating the forms and movement of some of the fruit and vegetables that they grow.
MATERIALS TESTING
Waste not Want Not Challenge
From the restaurant I took home some glass wine bottles to research and test their materiality. I was particularly inspired by the talk from Agapanthus interiors and began to extrude teardrop shapes from the crushed up wine bottles, using a vitrigraph kiln.
WORKING WITH GLASS
Choosing our focus material
Our group decided, with our combined knowledge and resources, that glass would be the most interesting material to use for our project. With the idea of creating a sign for the entrance of WTLGI we began testing out techniques such as kiln carving and sand blasting. I'm lucky enough to have a glass fusing studio at home in Cheshire so when the university workshops shut down I was still able to continue testing with glass while communicating with the group via Skype.
WTLGI SIGN
Creating a design
Once we had agreed on the idea of creating a sign for the entrance of WTLGI, I used procreate on the iPad to create a visual to present in our tutorial.
CREATING AN INSTALLATION
Re-Thinking Ideas
After feedback from our tutors and the restraunt we realised that our idea had become very 'boring' and we needed to return to our original experiments with light and glass and create more of an installation 'art' piece that would engage the customers a lot more. I used a cardboard box, a frame made out of a pizza box and a sheet of glass, and a lamp to explore how light reacts to being held over different waste materials.
EXPLAINING IDEAS
Communicating digitally
As our group was no longer allowed to meet in person due to the lockdown, we had to come up with a way to show each other how we had created certain experiments so that the others could replicate them and carry out their own tests. From my 'light-box' experiments I drew a diagram to send to the group illustrating my set up and how I achieved my results.
FINAL VISUALS
Presenting our ideas online
It became clear towards the end of the project that we would be unable to create a final 'physical' product and that our submission would be digital. As our outcome would have been an installation, it was challenging to explain to people what the end result would look like. For the front of our website I created a final image to try and demonstrate what 'Light garden' would have looked like.