Fear

This project is driven by personal reasons.

Following my recent diagnosis with depression and anxiety, I have been in a state of confusion and loss. In a way I have lost myself and regained a bit of me at the same time.

This experience has given me a chance to relook at past and my lifelong relationship with anxiety and fear. I’ve never looked so deep into it until now and I realised that I need to reexamine my perceptions of fear.

I’ve always been a fearful being and I’ve mostly been taught to ‘conquer my fears’ and to ‘be brave’ or ‘courageous’. It seemed like the only way to be happy was to live without fear. It was perplexing because fear is innate and to be rid of fear is to be not human.

As a child, I had crippling social anxiety. To my mother, I was shy. To my father, I was anti-social and almost rude. To my teachers, I was ‘special’. It is deeply ingrained in me that having fears make me weak and I am weak.

The struggle with fighting and embracing what makes me human is what I want to iron out. Fear is my worst enemy and my best friend. It is my worst enemy because it is irrational to me most of the time. I feel fearful of the things of least importance and that makes me weak. Fear inhibits me from doing things that I want to. I want to experience life but my fear cripples me every time.

I say that it is my best friend because even though it seems irrational I trust it fully because it is instinctive and innate. Fear mostly comes from experience and because of that I get very adamant when I feel fear. Fear is what makes me feel comfortable in this world. Albeit an inhibiting sense of comfort, it is the walls and shield around my world and all that is dear to me. It is my only line of defence against the rest of the world.

Curiosity

Curiosity is the strong desire to learn or to know. It can also refer to an unusual or interesting object or fact.

Curiosity comes from Cura (Latin for Care or Concern)

As children, we were very curious creatures and always asked questions like ‘why?’, ‘how?’ and ‘what?’. However as we grew, we appear to curb that innate and insatiable yearning to seek and discover beyond what we already know. We do so by limiting ourselves in different ways like rejecting the unorthodox because our fear of the unknown. The unknown has always made man uncomfortable as it is in our nature to protect ourselves from harm, which we link to unfamiliarity. We also seem to develop a sort of arrogance as we have progressed very quickly and are still making rapid progress.

Case Study 1

CURIO 2017 FYP by Xie Xiuyun

To investigate and understand basic curious questions we might have asked, but never got around to ponder upon. Aims to understand what it takes to be more in touch with subtle curious questions and presenting newly learned knowledge using illustration as a medium.

Case Study 2

Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of knowing 2013 Curated Exhibition by Hayward Touring in collaboration with Turner Contemporary.

What place does curiosity hold in the age of the internet? With so much information – visual, textual, and otherwise – so readily available, is our interest too easily peaked and then just as easily sated? If we look too closely at things, does our curiosity fade?

Traversing ages, mediums and seemingly, intentions to present an expansive inquiry into the spirit and structure of human engagement with the world.

Case Study 3

Cabinets of Curiosities (Kunstkabinett/Kunstkammer/Wunderkammer)

Encyclopaedic collection of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Natural history, geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art and antiquities.

I like the idea of curiosity transcending age, mediums and all sorts of boundaries. To me, curiosity is boundless but in this age, we have the internet and yet even though many answers are at our fingertips, we procrastinate and become less eager to sought it out. I like how curiosity can also mean an odd or interesting object. It is usually the odd and not normal that captures or attention and it is those things that we usually question.

With this project, I am to explore curiosity and encourage people to be more curious and adventurous to question and discover. Using craft and illustration I would like to create something that stimulates visually and that is also tangible.

Acrobats

Drawing and Sketching for designers

Patterns

Annddd that’s my banner, second from the left, with Jo standing next to it : )

This is Absurdity.

Fairytales are whimsical and often do not make sense. This absurdity and lack of logic are the beauty of such tales. In Death of the Little Hen, inanimate objects are animated and the flow of the story is sheer oddity.

To reflect the absurdity of this tale, I decided to do something psychedelic. I feel the odd colors and the discomposed motifs convey the whimsical rhythm of the tale. The motifs are made from the characters in the story. With ‘Nut Mountain’ as a setting where they lie.

Here’s still from the animation

and here’s the animation : https://youtu.be/kCV-ihMK_MA

Test Print

0%, 15% and 30% from left to right.

Staver’s Paintings

The stark red blood on the blade caught my eye first. It swoops down to the highlight on arm of the man on the right. The light on him makes him significantly lighter than his surroundings thus leading my vision down to the lit part of his belt. The blood splatter on the left draws my attention and with another downward motion, it leads me to the spotted beast at the bottom of the painting. It has a nice upward curve that finally pulls your attention up to the man on the left.

The bright red in the center catches my attention first and introduces the head of the beast. It shoots up and leads to the rear of the horse where there is a highlight. There, the face of a woman is seen and following down, we see something wrapped around her waist. As we follow it, we are led back to the horse’s front hoof and then to the head of th beast.

Most of these paintings lead our eyes in a circular motion. This one is no exception. The contrast of the red tongue and the bright green hide of the beast draws my attention first. It leads up to the sword and then its bearer before his green shirt brings us to the face of the woman. Her bright blue dress curves to the left where we are drawn to the sharp red claws of the beast which leads us back up to the head of it.

Morandi Paintings

Lines separating the colours of the background suggest the depth and even width of the space the objects are placed. Lines forming hard or soft edges around the objects suggest how far or close the objects are. The darkness of the lines appear as shadows indicating direction of light within the space and proximity of the objects.

The Death of the Little Hen

I picked ‘The Death of the Little Hen’ by Jacob and Wilhem Grimm as I feel it captures what fairy tales actually are. They are absurd and make absolutely no sense but they are great stories nonetheless. This absurdity is the essence and charm of these highly imaginative tales.

To channel that absurdity, I decided to go for something psychedelic, odd with a lack in coherence.

It would be a colourful piece and it would be done in 3 layers. The background would be marbled, the middle ground would be digital collage and finally illustrations.

Ryan Haran

Kate Shaw

Johanna Goodman

Alicja Pulit

Aaron Kaufman

Magdiel Lopez

Notsofamous Last Words

Goodbye Year One. You’ve been quite the sour peach.

This semester has been a pretty fun one for 2D. Words cannot describe how thankful I am that everyone had been so encouraging and helpful. I learned quite a bit about myself and through my peers, I’ve been given the privilege to peek into the realms of their creativity. Also, Joy, who was always understanding and helpful.

I’d say this semester has been really fruitful for me. Not because I feel like my works were amazing or anything close to that but because I feel myself finally getting comfortable with a bunch of things I’ve never been comfortable with. Not only that but the critique sessions have been really helpful in helping me find a direction and just learning new little things to keep in mind.

godspeed