Taking Bigfoot Golfing, Retro Image Thingies and other Potential Oddities

Taking Bigfoot Golfing

Well, having been through a mini frenzy of making odd, not really jewellery - not really anything else, type things involving model railway figures etc, I have stopped to take a breath and have a think about what and where it is all going, and if indeed it has to 'go' anywhere anyway. . .

Blue Bear says 'Hi'

As you probably noticed, the background images I have been using are rather wonderful, out of register, retro graphics of the cheap, far eastern variety. These ones date from around the nineteen sixties and are taken from some Japanese made water transfer sets I acquired from an Ebay source. I think they are beautiful in their unpretentious simplicity and depiction of various, often western (some are of cowboys, so the word Western is apt) cultural artifacts as seen through the lens of another culture and Art tradition etc. I don't imagine that they were ever intended to be admired as artworks as such, and probably you think I am nuts to love them so much ;-) Yeah, well. . .

A Bad Guy brooch

I've been trying to see how they want to be used. I tried putting them together with electronic components and upcycled wire grids and the like, which worked OK, but it felt like I was doing the same old thing that I do with my digital abstract images, without getting a feel for how these new images work with other materials. 

They are nice on their own as simple brooches or buttons, or just as image tile drops with a single hole at the top, but I can't help feeling there is something else I can do with them. I'll get there, I just need to give it time and space to emerge. . .

More Bad Guys

Godzilla or somesuch

TrainDeer

Pairing them with little plastic animals from the same source has some promise, as does using the little animals on their own with other bits and pieces. Sort of surreal dioramas or scenes can be constructed with their own weird stories or non-stories. . . hmmm. . .

I'll continue to mull this over, meanwhile making various beads and such. I'll let you know how I get on. .

cheers, 

Jon x

Psuedoshards. . .

Anyone who might have come across my work will probably have noticed that I like to make things look a great deal older than they really are. I have always liked the patina that age and use, or neglect come to that, gives to things, both natural and man made. So I age things up a lot.

This especially applies to me image transfer work. All those 'little squares' I wittered on about in a previous post. I love the way that an object with a brand new, digitally derived pattern or image, that could only have been made in the last ten to fifteen years, as the technology didn't exist before then, can be made to look as though it has just been dug up from an archaeological site somewhere, where it had lain for 200 years. I say 'somewhere' as the pieces in question resemble ancient artifacts, but you can't quite put your finger on what era or geographical location they seem to come from. They exhibit 'ancientness', and tap into whatever idea of ancientness we carry in our minds. They are the manifestation of an idea, rather than the reality that idea was formed by. I hope that makes some sort of sense. I could go on. . . and make even less sense, but I won't. 

So, as you can see by the pictures, I have been taking this idea a bit further. I have always liked broken shards of pottery, and the fact that (in the UK at least) they turn up in the ground almost everywhere. In cultivated land I should add. Little bits of blue and white pottery turn up in ploughed fields, allotments and urban gardens, not to mention washed up on beaches. I used to joke that there was a Victorian society whose object was to scatter broken crockery in every field in the UK. You could imagine the special outings they had. . . ;-)

So I made some 'Psuedoshards'. Fake shards made from polymer clay, with my digital images on, distressed to high heaven in my usual manner. I really like them. And judging by the reaction of the nice people on Facebook, so do others. They seem to fit the zeitgeist of a certain section of the jewelry making fraternity sorority. . . I am really looking forward to exploring this avenue further. So keep an eye out for these shards turning up in my shop over the next few weeks and beyond.

Best,

Jon x