This morning Jess and I attended a meeting with Julie and other revolt members to discuss the progression of Unit X. After talking as a sub-group yesterday, although we all have some really interesting research and development ideas, we feel that Unit X isn't exactly serving a purpose alongside everything that we have been taught over the past year. Unit X has always felt like a massive burden to crack- especially this absurdly random number 175. Luckily this is the same opinion that a lot of the Revolt members are feeling- so we are now taking a different route.
Julie proposed that we go back to the original brief and attempt to unpick it. We are using the idea of 175 to celebrate the anniversary of Manchester School of Art, and to our overall aim is to 'dress the city'. I've thought about this new perspective for a while, and agree that it is going to be a much more positive approach to the unit.
"Manchester School of Art... the name both reminds us of our historical traditions and our contemporary art and design practice, thus placing the theme old vs new at the core of our school's identity... this is about questioning the conventional and bridging the gap between what is possible and what is acceptable"
There are so many ways that we would be able to go about this new idea- but one thing made clear was that we are not to start again from scratch- but to move forward and attempt to morph our original ideas to link in with this concept. On first thought without doing any physical research, I have thought of a few rough ideas that I would like to propose to the group.
My key research has been centred around Victorian clothing- the idea of colour and restriction- and Queen Victoria/ The Queen of Hearts ( Alice in Wonderland concept). Just off the back of this- I instantly began to think about the concept of Manchester and the cotton industry- something that our city is very well known for. Secondly, the idea of restriction; on our tour of the Northern Quarter, we passed Strangeways Prison. This would be a perfect link to the idea of restriction through physical movement. The idea of colours and their symbolisms/ Alice in Wonderland link is going to have to be thought about a little more in depth, i'm not completely sure if I'm going to be able to sculpt that into anything yet...
Hopefully by tomorrow the group will have looked back at their original research and thought of other interesting ways that we may be able to sculpt our development.