Chris Ofili at the Tate Britain

I love Chris Ofili. I have always loved Chris Ofili. YES!

When I first started thinking about surface design and textiles he was an artist I was really interested in. The layers of intricate and beautiful marks on his canvases create an incredibly unique, tactile surface and to weirdos like me so delicous it actually makes me salavate. I don't think I'm going too far.

I never went to the upper room last time, and I loved it. I felt like I couldn't talk in there, the air was a bit heavier and it felt special. Twelve individually coloured rainbow paintings (blanco, rojo...) glow against the dark walnut walls of the rectangle small room, leading down to the daddy painting in multi-colour and decadent gold. The paintings are exuberant and magical.

But the upper room was not all there was on offer. Other paintings with wide influences from Zimbabwean cave paintings to funk and hip hop icons to vaginas stuck onto his paintings cut from porn magazines. It was interesting to see how as an artist he has developed, but for me his innovative use of materials excited me the most. Glitter, poo, resin, map pins.... a little bit of everything. With the use of weird materials and rather graphic painting, some of the paintings like 1997's Blossom below still looks pretty, with fresh colours and a flirty expression in the ladies eyes. Its this healthy mixture not necassarily in every painting, but in the collection over all at least of shocking dung with vivid lady bits and admornment and flowers that make this exhibition so glorious.

Despite my obsession with bumpy lovely bits, my favourite paintings are infact a collection of rather flat water colour paintings. They are lyrical and mesmirizing and really beautiful. I have two of them on my wall. I think these are more subtle but have alot of character.

Essay - The Messengers

I have chosen an Annette Messager exhibition as my object to analyse for my stage one essay. It was held at the Hayward Gallery Southbank 4th March-25th May 2009 and it was one of my favourite exhibitions I've ever been to, I can always rely on Hayward. They are smart. My favourite piece was Anatomy, hand knitted jumpers and other hand knitted garments picked up at second hand shops had been unravelled to string together drawings of parts of a human anatomy.

The link between yarn and the fabric it creates really interests me. I like the comparison between sculptures made out of fabric and those made out of yarn. Fabric sculptures tend to sit in a space whereas yarn sculptures fill a space and become part of it. Is a yarn sculpture a fabric?

Blythe House

On the day we went to Blythe House it was absolutely freezing, and I felt ill. I walked up a hill and bumped into stella also lost on the windy roads. We knocked on the wrong door and spoke to a really posh and smiley young man who pointed us along to the next door of a building which was for the most part concealed by a big old fence. With pointy bits up the top. On the inside, despite everyone there being jolly, I still felt like I was visiting a high securty prison. We were escorted to a little cold room, where we all sat around a large, grey, primary school looking table. From there we were taken to another room to view the books. The corridors were decorated in the most random ways, some had tiles on the walls, and most had big iron staircases going downwards. I felt as if I was walking around the haunted hotel in the shining and i kept expecting to see the sisters asking me to come and play.

In the viewing room there were plenty of huge books, some covered in plastic sheeting, some just falling apart slowly. We were given an introducation to what Blythe house is, how to use the facility and about the bits and bobs we were about to look at. Alot of them were more fascinating in a general sense rather than something i could see actually helping along my work. Alot of records of big stores fabrics they had stocked throughout the years, and trend forecasting from the 60's to the 80's. The only book that i would have wanted to grab and take home was an odd, small in comparison book on the wall next to the door. It had tiny bits of every type of fabric imaginable, stuck in by glue which now looks more like dark wood varnish. It had no order, and i couldn't really understand what it was for. It had pages empty with just the horrible glue marks. It had pages so full of random materials it took me a good while to sufficently stroke them. I loved the velvets, i want to make velvets! This led to a very interesting conversatin about how to make velvets and how it is possible at college. Oh yes! From another book i learnt about how the blurry floral prints ive seen are made. It is by printing on the warp.

Overall it was a fun and i learnt alot. I can see how it would really help if you had a very certain idea of what you wanted to research otherwise you could just end up getting lost in there and never coming out.