Apothecaries Hall Exhibiton

Elizabeth Turrell workshop 02/04/13

We had the privilege of meeting Elizabeth Turrrell today who is an expert in enameling. She presented a slideshow of her work and other major enameling work and also gave us a brief workshop and helped us with our labels. She taught us even more processes to do with enameling, and the fact they are so simple makes it so much better. Such things as using stamps on the enamels to create different marks, with some of the outcomes being beautiful. Here are some examples of her work that she brought along to show us.

Extended cabinet experimentation 01/04/13

I started making more sketches of what i want the aesthetic of my advertisements to look like. I'm thinking i am going to make around 4/5 ads some with illustrations and some with just text. I started looking at different fonts to see which one's worked best and had that old type theme. I then started playing about with the content, referring back to the remedies and adding a modern humorous twist.

Day 3 of enameling 22/03/13

Third day in the sculpture department carrying out more enameling on our labels for our installation. We worked from 10am unil 2pm. So it was a fairly brief day in the workshop but we gt just as much done as we have on the previous days as we have had the teaching in the way of the process and we all now know the steps in making the the layers on the labels. I myself spent a lot of my time todaysanding back the already fired image and adding more marks and tone to the drawings. These are what a few of my labels look like at the moment.

Day 2 of enameling 20/03/13

Day two of enameling. We carried out the exact same process as we did yesterday. But in this post i want to focus on the other happening of the day. I called for a group meeting on the subject of the work thats going into the middle room (apothecary) as I jumped at the chance of the fact everyone was in uni at the same time, and it was definitely worth while. We finally got a chance to all voice our opinions on what we wanted the feel of the room to be. We helped each other push forward and refine the actual work we were all going to produce, as all of us were unsure on whether the rest of the group would approve of others individual ideas and concepts. This is exactly what we needed to get us all back on track and to give people a sense of direction and that wen we work together we will get the job done. Hopefully in the next few weeks we will have many more meetings like this to make sure we get to the finished outcomes in time.

Day 1 of enameling 19/03/13

So today was a big step forward for our exhibition, as we had our first workshop in enameling. I have to say I found it a lot more fascinating than i assumed it was going to be. The fact the process is a lot simpler and a lot faster than I had imagined. With the end results being better than I had hoped, the fineness and sharpness of the detail you can produce on the metal is amazing. It was a very enjoyable day. Seeing the labels being fired in the kiln, applying glazes and then being re-fired before we could draw images on them was very interesting to carry out. A big plus was the speed of the process. The fact the labels only need to be in the kiln for about a minute was great, as we didn't have to wait about, we were constantly busy. Which i like. Today has definitely been the first of many days i will be experimenting with enameling.

Label Drawings 18/03/13

Today I spent a few hours putting together several drawings that im going to use for my enamel labels. I specifically made the drawings 14 cm by 7 cm. That being the exact size of the steel labels we will be enameling onto. My drawings focus on the bottles from the apothecaries hall, and also the actual book in which the original herbal remedies were written in.