Final year plans

Through the summer, I have been able to create the work that I want to without the influence of people saying I cannot. This led me to create paintings and drawings with a William Morris inspiration. I have looked at William Morris before and have been a fan of his work for years, although recently I have been more attracted to the symmetry within his work as they are often mirrored to make a whole picture.

Because of the work I created in the summer, for my second to last ever semester I would like to revisit a topic I looked at in first year; the structures and geometry hidden in nature. I found out that in nature the Fibonacci sequence features heavily, making natural materials, such as plants and flowers, symmetrical and identical. I focused more on the deterioration of flowers in first year, whereas now I would like to focus more on the structures in flowers and how they are identical.

I would like to look at flowers predominantly because they are the most easily accessible natural material that I am familiar. I would like to develop my work with flowers because they are such a resilient material. The variety in shape in colour especially is what attracts me to the material because in my wallpaper designs I want varieties spread across its length. Flowers have been depicted in art throughout the history of art, from classical still life paintings to Helen Chadwick’s ‘Piss Flowers’. I believe it is important to carry on using this material as there is still so much we do not know about flowers.

Flowers also conform to the Fibonacci sequence that I am trying to take influence from in this body of work. In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are the numbers in the following integer sequence, called the Fibonacci sequence, and characterized by the fact that every number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding ones. They often appear in biological settings, such as branching in trees, phyllotaxis (the arrangement of leaves on a stem), the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke and an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone's bracts.

I want to create wallpaper coverings of symmetrical images of natural materials (most likely flowers) to play with pattern in my work and to subtly hint and the identical patterns found within fauna and flora. I want to also look at the colours I use and whether this will play a part in whether I show enough of the realness of the object in my work.