Earlier Work of Laura Kent Textiles

Laura Kent | Level Four and Five Textiles in Practice | Manchester School of Art

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Monday, 13 May 2013

Unit X Tutorial

After a weekend of sample-making, and preparing for the bust week ahead, we were up early Monday morning for our final tutorial- this time with Nichola. In an email received on Saturday night, it was made clear that any work that we wanted to exhibit needed to be shown to Nichola on Monday, otherwise it would not be allowed in the exhibition. The thought of this dawned on me- afraid incase our new idea wasn't up to scratch- which ended in an almost sleepless weekend, trying so hard to perfect my pieces.

Luckily we all pulled it off, attending the tutorial with thirty samples in hand between the textiles and fashion students, and four mixed media squares from the film and media students, which were going to make for a very lovely piece of collaborative artwork. We lay all of our pieces out on the table, and I have to say, I felt extremely proud by the amount of work that we had been able to achieve over the two days.



The feedback that was given to us suggested that the fabric samples jelled well together, however Nichola wasn't sure about the flat mixed media pieces, due to the lack of them in comparison to fabric samples, and the problem that they looked too flat. Instead she had the idea that we should make these prints into free postcards to hand out at the event, so that the audience would be able to take something away with them. This was taken as a good idea, and everyone agreed that it would be a nice touch for our exhibition.

In terms of set up, we spoke about how we should exhibit our pieces, with Nichola suggest that the pieces should definitely be kept together as a large collection. We spoke about our idea to raise some of squares, to give a little more depth to the presentation, and although some of the group were unsure about this idea, Nichola agreed that it would be an interesting and successful concept. There was still the problem of where we were going to put such a big piece. From visiting the pub, it was clear that most of the wall were already occupied by artists selling their work, however, we were going to see if we could have a few of the pieces taken down for the two days. If this wasn't allowed- we remembered a black wall in the corner- which I think will highlight our lighter fabrics. From our first visit, a few of the group members had suggested hanging the pieces in a window cabinet- however after seeing the amount of samples that we had- that idea was automatically ruled out- we would've been using our samples as curtains!

This was definitely our best feedback to date- our final thing to do was to check that we had enough samples, by arranging them in a way that we thought would work. We decided that we needed three or four more samples, just to finish off the piece- so myself and Emily volunteered to do these tonight- before installing our piece tomorrow.