"My Life in a Nutshell"

The House from the Road

I live in a place called Ballingaddy, it translates as "The place of the thieves" but it was called that well before I ever got to Ireland so I don't take it personally.

The Fairy Fort, My Neighbours.

I can see the fort from the front garden and walk past it every time I walk the dog, It is a magical place.

My Kiln with buckets of Stoneware Glazes, the black one (Manganese Dioxide) did for my shelves, Runny mess!!!

As you can see, Quite tidy for me.

Shelves of glazes, slip colours and lotions and potions, Ignore the messy desk, I was working on the other one and tidied up onto this one. Ok! it's usually like this.

This is where all the experimenting takes place, I would love to show you the drawing area, but I can't find it.

Pallet chairs that I made last summer, comfortable, tigger loves them because they are the right height to stroke her from.

I'm a bit of a horder and picked up the pallets from college before they were thrown away.

Tigger! my old faithful hound. I thought that she was a millenium dog, but my daughter tells me she is only 2001, so it just goes to show how bad my memory is.

I had said that I listen to Classic Rock, and I do, but I have ecclectic  tastes to go with my eccentric personality and find I will listen to anything that isn't modern, (Rave, Rap or girl/boy bands).

I like earthy colours, blues and greens, but Turquoise is my favourite colour and I also love the bright primary colours used in Celtic Art, so there you are, (See above.)

The last place I lived before coming here was in Northumberland, as far away from London as you can get without being in Scotland. 

This is the third time I've been to Art College, The first time I was seventeen and was way to young and fell in love almost straight away, which meant rocking the night away and being to tired to go to college. The second time, I was going to go to either Leeds or Liverpool, but this didn't work out.

So this time is the charm.

I love living and studying here in Ireland and intend to become a citizen as soon as I am able to.

I hope that this helps you to understand me better.

Cheers, Steve

An Overview of the 3rd Semester Project "Object"

The Initial Object

I spent some time exploring the potential of several objects including shells, one of which I worked on for several weeks before dismissing it due to its limited potential, though I haven’t dismissed the idea of using shell forms in later work. I also looked in depth at driftwood, horseshoes, and pebbles before finally deciding on the pebble above, not only because of the interesting natural shape and smoothness of its basic form, but also because it looked similar to a sweet (humbug) that I loved as a schoolchild.  It also resembles a ceramic piece that had been “Naked Raku” fired, something that I had only recently tried.  This gave the pebble a link to both my past learning experiences and the present one. I saw this as a sound foundation from which to work.

                Having attempted to replicate the structure of the pebble in card and with wire and art straws, it became apparent that I was concentrating far too much on the surface pattern and form of the pebble and not on the 3 dimensional structure of the object itself, which is why the forms I had been working on looked like drawings of the piece in paper and card.  In effect I was not allowing myself to see the wood for the trees right in front of me.

Prime Object 2

                It wasn’t until I had this pointed out to me and discussed the problem in “Crit” that I was able to re-visit the pebble afresh and explore its form enough to move forward. This visualisation of the pebble as a solid object brought about the structure shown above, which became the basis of my further work.

                I began to see the lines and flow of this piece as something inherent in its shape and structure rather than surface texture and this led me to explore the symbiotic relationship between skeletons and muscles as well as looking at scaffolding and the buildings that were usually hidden by them.

                I made several models, some of which survived and a few that didn’t, exploring and pushing my knowledge forward.  Although I haven’t made what I would consider to be a final piece, I have explored deeply the objects I have had and moved forward in my education.

The most recent piece.

There are a few things that I would like to explore further for this project before I would consider it finished. The casting of a tubular joining piece for framework construction, layering of slab rolled muscles on a solid frame and a final piece are some of the avenues that I would have liked to explore and I may well come back to this at a later date.