Final year project
Recollections May Differ [Read more]
OFF - ON
A1 Screen-print of a digital montage created by combining my childhood drawings and re-assembling photographs of our toys to create a grotesque, god-like creature.
A1 Screen-print created by hand collaging acetate printed with our own images along with various 'found' images to creature a surreal, dream-like composition.
Resin Sculptures
A series of fun, colourful resin sculptures created by deconstructing and then re-assembling children's toys into new forms, and casting these new chaotic objects multiple times.
Screen-print
A1 multiple layered coloured screen-print with collaged elements.
Screen-print
A1 colourful screen-print created using multiple layers and stencils.
Resin sculpture
Pink resin sculpture casted from baby-doll parts which have been assembled into a new form.
Screen-print
A1 Screen-print created by hand collaging printed acetate sheets and exposing this collage onto a screen. Gold accents produced by hand-painting gold ink onto areas of the print.
A suspended sculpture combining dis-assembled components of childhood toys including dolls and teddy bears.
Phebe Hughes
I have worked collaboratively and autobiographically with my sister Abigail in this project, exploring themes including memory, nostalgia, identity and childhood through the unique perception of our shared experience growing up as identical twins.
Working in a range of different media including screen-print, digital montage, casting and sculpture, our work has an overall strong and garish style using an oversaturated, bright colour palette to overwhelm the viewers' senses and create a surreal quality. These vivid colours and a child-like, naïve aesthetic with chaotic ensembles of images allowed us to work playfully exploring the ideas surrounding childhood imagination and dreams. Within the montages and prints, we used old paintings and drawings collected from our childhood so we felt strongly that we were also collaborating with our past selves. This acted as a visual conduit to our own past and childhood memories creating a shared sense of nostalgia that we expressed in our work.
By choosing to work in both 2D and 3D media, we aimed to expand the viewer’s senses, giving them the chance to visually connect to the imagery that could trigger their own nostalgia. Our work includes recognisable images and pop-culture references from our childhood, such as Barbie, Trolls and My Little Pony, as evoking a sense of nostalgia for both ourselves and the viewer was a key focus of our investigation. However, in order to create a more playful and witty quality to the work, we re-assembled these recognisable images into new, often grotesque creatures to cause the viewer to question their own memories and to represent how memories are often a re-constructed misrepresentation of the past.
Within our work there is a dramatic contrast with the sickly-sweet, cheerful aesthetic of our sculptures and prints, juxtaposing the often sinister tones of the darker imagery revealed under the closer inspection of the work. This created a sense of uncanny and discomfort within the theme of childhood and was influenced by the Surreal, Dada’s photomontage and Freud’s Theory of Das Unheimliche. These slightly disturbing elements hover between the playful and the macabre, using repetition, doubling and mirroring to allude to our personal experiences as twins and also to create a strange unsettling quality to the work.
Final year project
Recollections May Differ
Awards
During my time at Secondary School, I was awarded an Art Scholarship, won the Spen Trophy for Art and also won a competition for designing a Coffee Shop Logo and a Governor’s Prize for a London Olympics Design.
I won the Year 12 Prize for Art and was awarded the John Pike Art Prize.
Work Experience
I really enjoyed my time doing work experience at the Art Department and Picture Desk of Radio Times, This experience allowed me to gain an understanding of the detailed design processes behind the physical copies of the magazine, as well as seeing how it has adapted with the growth of digital media. I found the experience very interesting as it highlighted the importance of the application of Art and Design within this industry. I was able to develop my compositional skills by creating layout designs and the page formatting, editing photographs and learning photoshop editing skills from professionals. These skills have been very useful to me during my current practice of collaging and screen-printing.
My work experience at the Gerald Moore Art Gallery in South East London was really fun, I worked as part of a team running creative art workshops for primary school children. I had to help come up with fun and creative ideas which would keep this younger audience engaged with the artistic tasks which we had set for them. Working as a team really helped me become more confident as a leader, improve my communication skills and built on my collaborative working skills which have been necessary for my project this year.
Work experience at Blue Zoo Animation Studios was a really exciting experience for me as I am interested in graphics and digital design. I was given tasks to do such as sketching, character design and storyboarding using digital drawing software, as well as editing video clips. The studio produces many successful Children's TV shows and their animation work is imaginative, colourful, and playful which are key qualities of my current practice, and the experience has definitely been very influential to my work today.