Workshop: Poppy Pitt

A day project with Poppy, a postgraduate from Goldsmiths, who came and spoke to us about her work and gave us advice and techniques to use in our projects. When I spoke to Poppy I realised that I was especially interested in the act of hiding and camouflage, I started to look into the way people attempt to blend into a crowd, whether by social group or by dressing in a certain way and also into spaces that can emphasise this visual deceit.

I spent the day looking at places where people can hide, then using line to capture the space. I found that the most interesting way to draw the space was by using different thickness's of pen and parallel lines, a combination of the two helped to define the space and show the depth in the image. My favourite hiding corner was behind a curtain, tucked behind a bin and a sofa, it was the most enclosed space I found when wandering around my campus and completely hid anyone from view.

Poppy later got us to to 'draw' one of our images in 3D, the image above is of my finished piece. I wanted to capture the essence of the hiding place and did this by hanging strings. I liked the idea but the finished piece wasn't quite how I'd envisaged it due to a lack of resources and was slightly disappointing. It could've been improved by hanging more strings of different thickness's and lengths, also if they'd been ironed flat the image would've been less distorted and all the bottom edges would've been clearer.

I now want to look into different hiding places and the connections to children's games. Camouflage could become an interesting point to research from, perhaps for objects rather than just people.