Tomas Saraceno
In Orbit 2013
Bioshpare
Saraceno use of space and involvement of the public, encouraging public to interact with contemporary art interests me, large scale interactive installations. futuristic.
string/wire connections, linking together, linking people together.
reminds me of planets/solar system, something scientific.
Takes a traditional playground feautre and brings it into the art setting, a new context.
simon tom bloor
Alex-Anndrea Mooney
Born 1994. Dublin. Ireland
Academic History
Sheffield Hallam University Fine Art Degree. Year Two September 2015 – Present
University of Lincoln Fine Art Degree. Year One September 2014 – June 2015
Chesterfield College Level 4 BTEC Foundation in Art and Design September 2013 – June 2014.
Chesterfield College Level 3 Extended Diploma in Art and Design September 2011 – June 2013.
Chesterfield Level 2 College Extended. Diploma in Art and Design September 2010 – June 2011.
Brookfield Community School: GCSE – June 2010
Art: A
English Language: B
English Literature: B
Maths: C
Science: C
Graphics: C
Drama: C
Employment History
S1 Art Space: Invigilator: June to Present
In this role I am working with S1 Art Space gallery on Park Hill invigilating their current exhibition ‘The Brutalist Playground’ by 2015 Turner Prize winner Assemble and artist Simon Terril. The exhibition is aimed at young children and welcomes families to come and interact with the space. I am responsible for welcoming visitors, keeping an eye of children and supporting the maintenance and upkeep of the space and work. In this role it is important to have a good knowledge of the venues exhibition so I could confidently answer any questions visitors may have.
Art Sheffield Festival 2016: Invigilator: April to May 2016
As an invigilator for Art Sheffield Festival my responsibilities included greeting visitors to exhibitions at various sites located around the city and ensuring they felt welcome. In this role it was important to have a good knowledge of the venues and artists exhibiting so I could inform the visitors and answer any questions and also to promote the festival.
Odds and Ends Exhibition The Art House Café April 2016
This exhibition centred on the theme of environment and featured a range of work from textiles, painting, photography and drawings. Our group combined our different artistic skills and brought them together. I learnt to work and communicate within a group. As a group we held an opening night and welcomed the public. We were responsible for the promotion of the exhibition and advertised through social media, friends, leaflets and posters. This exhibition was both challenging and rewarding.
Gage Gallery Exhibition Kelam Island November 2015
This exhibition gave me a great opportunity to work in a new space and develop art work which could reflect the aesthetics and history of the building and area. I worked in a group and helped to curate to present our work successfully to the public. We worked to advertise our exhibition to the public through social media and word of mouth.
Chesterfield College Annual Arts Festival June 2014
I have been a part of Chesterfield College Annual Arts Festival which featured work across many art and design disciplines. I worked in a group to prepare exhibition spaces and successfully curate the space. This was my first exhibition and I learnt valuable team working skills and ways of presenting my own work alongside others.
Updated 06/07/16
Summary of CV. Biography
Alex-Anndrea Mooney (Born Dublin. Ireland, 1994) is an artist based in Sheffield U.K and she is currently completing a (BA) Honour’s Fine Art Undergraduate Degree at Sheffield Hallam University (2014-Ongoing). She previously studied Art and Design at Chesterfield College from 2010 to 2014. Group Exhibitions include Chesterfield College Annual Arts Festival (June 2014) Gage Gallery Kelam Island (2015) and Odds and Ends at The Art house Café (2016). She has worked Art Sheffield 2016 as an invigilator across various locations and also S1 Art Space as an invigilator for their current exhibition.
The aim of my website is to create a successful, clear and well laid out platform for me to record accurate notes of lectures and seminars, as well as document my art practice and ongoing research. It will also provide me with a space to document my exhibition visits and artist research and to showcase my work and projects. My website will focus and highlight my art practice and current research in a carefully created online space. It will explore my journey as an artist and document my progress for self-reflection as well creating a positive, vibrant and unique online space for people to view my art practice. My website will demonstrate research and the development of my ideas and also support my professional art practice and help me progress as an artist. I have set up my website to articulately express my current and future ideas, showcase my inspirations and influences and to develop into a representation of my art practice. My website has become a record of my reflections allowing it to be my point of reference for inspiration. I have created simple to read, individual blog posts to easily find specific these inspirations and influences. Currently my practice explores ways of reconstructing familiar everyday materials and objects and transitioning them into something new and not so ordinary. I take my inspiration from personal experiences and my environment. I aim for my website to be easily accessible so that it can serve as a digital portfolio which will hopefully help to support future applications and opportunities.
Alex-Anndrea Mooney (Born Dublin. Ireland, 1994) is an artist based in Sheffield U.K and she is currently completing a (BA) Honour’s Fine Art Undergraduate Degree at Sheffield Hallam University (2014-Ongoing). She previously studied Art and Design at Chesterfield College from 2010 to 2014. Group Exhibitions include Chesterfield College Annual Arts Festival (June 2014) Gage Gallery Kelam Island (2015) and Odds and Ends at The Art house Café (2016). She has worked Art Sheffield 2016 as an invigilator across various locations and also S1 Art Space as an invigilator for their current exhibition.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My artist statement updated as I have progressed and developed throughout the year.
My practice explores the reconstruction of familiar every day and found materials by changing their meaning and transitioning them into something new through experimentation. I am interested in making the everyday not so ordinary and exploring how common materials are usually perceived.
Found and recycled materials are a large aspect of my work. I collect and source a range of different materials such cast offs, old and decayed objects, fabrics and strings, often from charity shops, things I find on journeys or that people have given me. I am interested in the aesthetic and historical qualities that they bring. I have continued to investigate deterioration of forgotten materials and objects and incorporated my experiments with rust and decay on fabrics into my drawings.
In my practice I have been inspired by my personal experiences and memories, which have lead me to explore these aspects of my life through the experimentation of materials, drawings and sculpture. I have been influenced to explore my past experiences that have left physical scars which can be considered imperfections. This has seen my work develop into a representation of myself.
My drawings explore the delicacy of the human body, looking under the skin and stripping down to skeleton form. My initial starting point for this series of work was to reflect on past experiences, specifically an accident I had a few years ago were I fractured my left arm (my dominant arm) in two places, resulting in having an operation to insert two metal plates.
I am interested in moment in which you lose control, my drawings investigate the act giving up and regaining control through set rules, such as blind, timed and continuous line drawings. I have been exploring tactile materials to reflect the delicacy of the body, specifically the bones, whilst they are strong and build us and can also be weak and break us.
An artist that has inspired my process of working is Judith Scott who is an American fibre and textile sculptor artist. Scott was born with downs syndrome and profound deafness which isolated her throughout her life. Scott was placed in Creative Growth, the first centre in the world dedicated to supporting artists with disabilities.
Her work reflects little cultural input being the expression of her creative mind and working on instinct. Scott’s work is very tactile and organic which I can relate to in my own practice. She challenges the idea of art by not having any formal education or qualifications. Scott creates work based on her curiosity and her natural instinct to collect, she gathers materials and turns them into sculptures without planning. Scott collected jewellery, objects and anything she could find to conceal in one of her pieces. I find the intricate connections made between each material and the way they are wrapped and combined together really interesting. Scott’s work has greatly inspired my way of working through actively collecting materials.
British sculptor artist Christine Borland has also had an influence on my work, specifically by her drawings, which are a starting point for her sculptural work. I am interested in the relationship Borland creates between the human body and nature.
Borland’s work explores variety of disciplines, she draws on human genetics and science and creates ceramic sculptures. Borland practiced medical stitches on acritical limbs used by medical students. Her drawings are delicate and combine limbs and trees, exploring ways of mutation.
Borland’s drawings show the body morph in something new through the influence of nature. I feel her work has influenced my thinking and process of making by encouraging my practice to develop and explore the process of repairing the body through the use of natural and recycled materials.
My practice has primarily focused my arm, which I now feel is to narrow a subject and for future developments I plan to investigate the body as a whole and wider my perspective by exploring the skeleton figure and show imperfections and scars in contrast to the whole body. I plan to develop my drawings into sculptures, I would like to work with natural materials and objects such as sticks and wood to recreate the body in a larger scale.
I visited the Platform exhibition at the Millennium Gallery today
, below are the pieces which most stood out to me.
(image on RIGHT) I liked natural and environmental aesthetic this piece has. I was interested in the connection between the image and the wooden board, I thought it linked very well.
Rachel Whittington (Image Below)
As someone who takes trains regularly and has had many ticket collections, this stack on train tickets grabbed my attention, I liked the simplicity of it, appropriating an everyday and ordinary object into a gallery space, taken out of context to be viewed, usually a throwaway item, the tickets have been stacked and contained and protected.
Em Smith (Image Below)
I liked the playful composition of these pieces and also that selected areas have been used, rather then the entire space.
Roles and Responsibilities: As a group we discussed and agreed on roles we would like to have. These changed and developed over time as we struggled abit as a group at the beginning because we did not all know each other. We developed to work as a team and share responsibilities.
Our theme for the exhibition is environment, we decided on this as we found links between our practices which linked to the environment and natural materials.
Common themes: to explore everyday/non-traditional materials, deconstruct/reconstruct. The use of everyday materials and objects allows the work to be relatable to the artist and the viewer,
My exhibition proposal is based around the idea of the everyday, the majority of my work is inspired by things I find and where I find them. I am interested in the reconstruction of familiar materials and changing their meaning and how they are perceived. I would like to create a series of work which shows everyday materials transform into something not so every day, yet still recognisable. Materials/process: Cheap, scrap, throwaway, castoffs, old, decay, aged, faded, reclaimed, charity shops, recycled, found objects/materials/ minimal. Site specific/venue white walls, clean exhibition space, I like the idea of appropriating found materials which we are used to seeing in our homes, outside or in charity shops into a pristine exhibition space to detach them from the outside world and show them a new light.
I am interested in seeing the ordinary change and transition into something new, departing it from its original associations
An idea central to your work
Common themes/ Grand ideas
Ways of working
Use Materials or processes
Site specific work for a venue,
Etc, etc, etc 100 and 300 words.
Common themes: To explore everyday/non-traditional materials, deconstruct/reconstruct. The use of everyday materials and objects allows the work to be relatable to the artist and the viewer,
My exhibition proposal is based around the idea of the everyday, the majority of my work is inspired by things I find and where I find them. I am interested in the reconstruction of familiar materials and changing their meaning and how they are perceived. I would like to create a series of work which shows everyday materials transform into something not so every day, yet still recognisable. Materials/process: Cheap, scrap, throwaway, castoffs, old, decay, aged, faded, reclaimed, charity shops, recycled, found objects/materials/ minimal.
Site specific/venue white walls, clean exhibition space, I like the idea of appropriating found materials which we are used to seeing in our homes, outside or in charity shops into a pristine exhibition space to detach them from the outside world and show them a new light.
I am interested in seeing the ordinary change and transition into something new, departing it from its original associations
Currently my practice is investigating the structure of bones, drawing from my personal experiences of fracturing both bones in my left and right arms. I am working with found and recycled materials to create a representation of the bone.
The work explores the readymade, appropriating ,found everyday materials in new contexts.
I am interested in the process of repairing the body, with this piece once I made the structure from sticks recycled paper, I broke areas of the piece to represent the action of breaking bones, then using found objects and nails to repair.
