Exam Paper 2018 - Freedom and/or Limitations

The Open Road (with Limitations)

As with any set of visual work the quality of the source imagery you gather for the Exam Unit is vital. Remember this unit is worth 40% of your overall grade, so it is essential to gather strong source imagery, use half term to take a strong set of photographs to inspire your project. 
Use the bullet points in the theme introduction below and search sites like Pinterest for inspiration.

Introduction to the theme from the Exam Paper:


The theme is:FREEDOM and/or LIMITATIONS
Archibald MacLeish wrote ‘Freedom is the right to choose’. Originally expressed in a political context, this phrase could also sum up many of the fundamental ideas that have inspired artists. For the Fauves it was the right to paint in whatever colours they chose. For the Cubists, the choice was how to depict form and space. In Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Readymades’ he chose ordinary objects to be transformed into pieces of artwork. Artists and designers relish the freedom to explore ideas and express their own personality in their work. Van Gogh is perhaps the archetypal ‘romantic artist’, who chose to take his own path, expressing with brushstrokes, colour and energy his unique vision of the world. Mondrian’s highly disciplined paintings were governed by the wish to condense experience down into its simplest expression. The freedom to move, to travel, to dance and to have fun has inspired many artists. Sydney Carline and Peter Lanyon explore the soaring freedom of flight. Francis Alÿs and Tania Kovats explore more conceptual possibilities of travel. Dance inspired Degas and Matisse. Music inspired Paul Klee and Romare Bearden. No artist has been more playful than Picasso, who would insert clues, such as the letters ‘JOU’ (inferring ‘play’ in French), into his Cubist paintings and collages. The advancement of technology and availability of new materials have always given artists and designers freedom to explore new ideas and to push materials to new limits. In the early industrial age iron and steel gave designers such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel the opportunity to design bridges and ships on a scale that had previously been impossible. New materials and ideas fuelled a revolution of possibilities in the 1960s. Synthetic materials such as plastic could be used to create forms with great freedom. Verner Panton’s cantilevered S shaped chair was playful, brightly coloured and inspired by popular culture, echoing the sense of fun and liberation that was a characteristic of 1960s design. Art crossed into design, for instance Bridget Riley’s Op Art paintings inspiring the design of miniskirts, and commercial design crossed into art, for Warhol and other Pop Artists. Musicians such as the Doors and the Beatles drew on multiple influences from literature and art. Today’s new technologies, such as 3D printing, computer-aided design and virtual reality, offer even more spectacular possibilities. Joris Laarman’s Bone Chair for instance uses CAD to mimic the way growth occurs in nature. Swedish design group Front have developed motion capture technology to make light-pen strokes drawn in the air into physical reality and build ‘spontaneous furniture’. Artists and craftspeople relish the material qualities of their chosen media. Sometimes they work within the traditional limitations of the media and create a restrained beauty, such as Edmund de Waal’s porcelain forms, and at other times they challenge expectations. Eva Hesse’s use of latex and rope expanded the vocabulary of sculpture in the 1970s. Roger Hiorns’ sparkling cave of copper sulphate crystals transformed an ordinary Peckham flat in 2008. True originality is hard won. The photographer Richard Avedon wrote ‘Start with a style and you are in chains – start with an idea and you are free’.

Here are some other suggestions to help stimulate your imagination: 
• fences, barriers, borders, chains, ropes, binding 
• ditches, tidal reaches, city limits 
• arcs, intersections, parabolas, mathematical forms 
• captivity, confinement, prisons, offices, cells 
• stresses, cracks, breaking points 
• free expression, political freedoms, debate, discussion, argument, protest 
• travel, exploration, independence, leisure, holidays, escape 
• dance, eccentricity, abandonment, rescue 
• flight, birds, aeroplanes, clouds, thermals 
• running, jumping, falling, swimming, diving 
• swirls, marks, gestures, colours 
• leotards, cycling clothes, flowing fabrics, wetsuits