Sampling-Data Project Evaluation

When I started this project over 2 months ago I felt slightly overwhelmed by the Data concept. The word 'Data' for a start felt like something I would never find interesting. Luckily I keep all of my food shopping receipts to keep a track of every month, so I knew at least I had some kind of Data collected already. After trawling the web for 'Data' artists I finally came across a way of displaying Data that spoke to me. The 'Of All the People In All Of The World' exhibition got me thinking of more exciting ways to do this. For some reason 100s&1000s popped into my head and I decided to go with that. Last term I got too hung up on all my work having a meaning, and having a solid reason for everything, and I felt this held me back massively, so I was determined this term to just go with the flow and get doing instead of just thinking. The more abstract the better.

I think over the Christmas period I could have got a lot more work done to get a head start in the new term, but self motivation is something at times I can struggle with, as I think everyone does at some point, and getting started with a project before you have any ideas can be daunting. However, as my ideas started to flow and I actually started to create, I became more inspired and more motivated, and that drove me through the whole project. 

We were set 3 colour tasks to start the term with, one of which was to create a moodboard to extract colours from. I just quickly threw one together which sunsets as the theme. I worked with this colour palette throughout the weave workshop but as my work with the 100s&1000s progressed, by the time I came to knit those colours were no longer relevant and I was not happy sampling with them. I decided to make a new moodboard, created a new colour palette and was a lot happier for the last 2 weeks.

For the first half of the unit I did weave which I really enjoyed. It took a long time to measure out the yarns and set up the warp, the whole of week 1, but once I was able to actually start weaving it was worth it. I mainly experimented with materials and pattern at first, trying out selection we were provided. By week 3 I had more visual research from my experiments to work from so started to translate those qualities. I found some yarns that reminded me of 100s&1000s so I experimented with them quite a bit. I also used strips of receipts as well as nylon monofilament to give a translucent feel which was inspired by my glue experiments. I would love to go back with my more developed ideas but I know that I would have thought that of knit if I had done that first too.

I carried out lots of experiments during this project which have informed my work massively. I made sure I documented everything I did so  that I could go back any time I needed for inspiration. 

Next I went onto knit. At first I found this a little boring and very frustrating. But by week 2 we had learnt new techniques and I had changed my colour palette so felt a lot more inspired. And by coming in to practise every day, I got a lot more confident in the machines, and the frustration went away, well most of the time. At this point in the project I had some really strong ideas that I wanted to translate. I focused on fluidity and bleeding of colours, inspired by the colouring bleeding off the 100s&1000s in my experiments.

The skills I have learned during the 6 weeks are going to stand me in good stead for the rest of this course and I can't wait to learn more. I have become so much better at motivating myself, and I think coming into uni everyday, even if I only planned on using the computers, has really helped with that. I feel I have a really strong collection of samples backed by strong ideas that I would love to carry on exploring and probably will go back to at some point. I have pushed my self out of my comfort zone and it has paid off as I feel way more confident than  last term.