Lecture

After talking it out with Alexandros, I’ll be looking at doing my dissertation on the sexualisation of people within advertising, though obviously that is a very broad outlook of what I will actually be doing.

I want to explore the ideas that cultures across the world share with one another, but also differentiate; the first obvious view on this is the difference between South Korea and the UK when it comes to their sexualisation which is almost non-existent in Korea, though this may be due to the outlook of someone from outside the country.

I think this has a lot of depth to it, though I’m not totally sure if this is still the idea that I want to continue with in the long run, so I might look over it this weekend to see if I can explore some different routes

Malene was kind enough to grace us with her presence today, allowing us to take a glimpse at her work and her method to creating her ceramic pieces that she has taken to many exhibitions and won just as many awards.

Malene works with mixed media sculpture making and arranging multiple components into complex narratives which are often visualised as characters that can be created through complex wordplay from her own country of Denmark as well as other places she has visited throughout her practise. Her inspiration came from many different things;

Folk Art – Arbol de la Vide, Mexico
Outsider Art – A symbolic composition of the Spiritual World, Augustin Lesage (1923)
Walt Disney (Mainly the older films) – Snow White, Walt Disney
Scandinavian Heritage – Pigen Der Finder Guldhoene, Harald Slott-Moller (1906)
Nature
Films – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Imitated Nature
Ceramics
Music

Taking examples from work she has shown, I’ll talk briefly on how she approaches her ceramic work:

If I Had a Heart I Could Love You – Creates small scale models to visualise the final image before making it, allowing her to follow the model and make small changes as she goes along
I Skovens Dybe Stille Uro (2014) – A Stylised forest on small plinths, she made the model, allow her to create the finished version in just a couple days
Craft Emergency (2016) – Uses a few different materials to create a very small model of her ideas for a massive room. The final piece will be using a multitude of materials, ceramics, fabrics, recycled products (Tyres etc.) – The piece has to educate the audience on the processes behind the making of the piece.

Her most recent piece was quite extraordinary as well: In the Dead of Night (2015) Jerwood Makes Award, Jerwood Space, London, UK – First piece of installation that she made that the audience could actually enter and explore – A tale of animals in the forest, from Birth, through life, unto Death.

The practical side allowed her to show us the creation process behind some of her small pieces that she uses as decoration for the main piece, such as the mushroom, grass and worms that have taken a hold within many of her exhibition. Using different techniques, the main idea was to form the shape from the inside of the clay, allowing the clay to go about on its own on the outside, allowing for a much more natural look to the models.