I went to a plenary session yesterday and had a very interesting conversation about whether people on my course this year should have studied Product Development or Contemporary Applied Art. Some students are struggling to write their essays or develop their final project, partly because they want to use items in commercial catalogues as inspiration. On the CAA course this is not acceptable. I was absolutely staggered that anyone would want to use anything in an Argos catalogue (Yuk!) as inspiration. It would never have occured to me! But as one of the younger students (who is very bright and astute) explained to me, if you want to design commercial products, like lengths of fabric that Debenhams might buy, you would look closely at what is commercially available.
Our course module from the first year, on Post Modernism, made it quite clear that applied art tended to be used in short run, limited edition art works, if they were applied to a commercial product. They tended to use hand techniques, supported by digital technology. They were not run in wholly mechanised or digitised processes. Does it show my limited thinking that it had never occurred to me that Product Design was the high volume, commercial, version of our CAA course? It would just never occur to me to look to commercial catalogues to gain inspiration. I have certainly looked at the displays in department stores to gain inspiration on how to display goods to best effect, and how to apply hand drawn imagery to commercial textile and ceramic products. I just did not see my work in the mass market context, although I am interested in practical applications for my output.
This student said that she looked at commercial catalogues because she was interested in the practical application of her artwork. As she does the "with Marketing" option, her work is focussed on identifying a market to which to play and then exploiting it to maximum capacity. Whereas my work is about me enjoying the design process and working out how my liking for practicality, can best utilise digital print to create short runs of limited edition furnishing fabric. It had just never occurred to me that the Product Design degree could be an option for an artist! I think I have spent too much time worrying about being seen as a middle age, middle class hobby crafter, and consequently not even considered commerciality.
I have also thought quite a lot about the specific attributes of digital print and how it fits with my work. I think my coloured pencil weekend will give me the ability to use a lot of different colours from the hand blending techniques. Digital print interprets fine colour changes very well, so this shows how my drawing linked with this style of print makes my work contemporary. Digital print is expensive because of the amount of ink used for detailed colour interpretation, but technology enables specific tailoring of design to be completed. I like cushions where the image is cropped eg you get a pomegranate design, but you place the image so that the right side and bottom are cropped out of the image and only two thirds of the fruit can be seen. If this were cut out of a repeating pattern on fabric, there would be a lot of wastage. But with digital print, you could just section out the area that you wanted, and print just the one square. Or if you wanted 20 exactly the same, you could do a tile repeat of just the section you wanted, and maximise fabric usage. Or if you wanted a couple of cushions with mirror images to sit at either end of a settee, you could just do two, using the flip function on Photoshop. Once again, using technology to make work contemporary.
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