V & A museum

Today we visited the V & A museum. The first exhibition I visited was the Illustration Awards. I found this to be very creative and detailed, especially the pencil sketches.  The second exhibition I visited was the making it up: photographic fiction followed by the art of remembering. 

The final exhibition I viewed was the Memory palace. 

Whilst visiting the memory palace it explained to us how to remember. "choose a place, get to know it as well as you can, walk around it impressing every detail on your memory until you can take it in your mind when you are not there. Then you place the things you need to remember around the building in the form of pictures. These pictures must be startling enough to trigger your imagination. In this way when you need to recall something you merely go into your imagination to the spot where you have stored it. 

Another quote I found when viewing this exhibition which relates to memory is "when they took me back to my cell, I lay on the floor, watching the jewels in my memory palace spin and turn, gorgeous and bright. for the first time i could see them-not just in my minds eye but in reality. I could actually see them, they were beautiful" 

I feel that visiting these exhibitions really helped and encouraged me to understand the term memory and build around the theme of it. I enjoyed being  able to research into this by visiting a gallery and being able to view and explore the work inside. 

This is a pencil and charcoal sketch on tracing paper called the "Roman column and concrete metal rod" by Minho Kwon.  I found this illustrator particularly interesting because of his shading with in the piece. His use of various tones included creates a massive sense of detail involved and produces the shading of light very well. 

This piece is also by the illustrator Minho Kwon, called "industrial revolution and plastic surgery" also made using pencil and charcoal on tracing paper.

These three paintings have been produced by Grace Helmer called "The Fugitive" they are digital prints from original art work in oil paint and graphite on cartridge paper.

From the illustration awards artist Pietari Posti creates this piece called "Swallows and Amazons"

Photographic image by Duane Michals called "Chance Meeting" Michals uses sequence of photographs to suggest a narrative. The stories are often open-ended and sometimes even surreal. In this sequence, two men pass in an alley way without incident, but the encounter seems loaded with significance. The photographs are framed consistently, and the figures move in and out of the shot, as in a film. 

When visiting the jewellery department of the V&A I came along this beautiful circle, known as the "Tower of gems" I found it to be creative and shiny. I admire the fact that is it not just in the form of a circle but is actually a line spinning around and around till it forms a bigger circle. It can also be seen as a form of a timeline in the way it has progressed.