UNIT 12 | Oliviapotts

Brief: Answer the question - What does Manchester mean to you?

The way I approached this brief was to focus on the buildings as to me, the buildings and history of them is what makes Manchester. So based on this I was instantly drawn to Pollard Street East, just out of Manchester city center, this was because for work experience over the past year I had done a weeks work in the Pretty Little Thing factory, which is based at Pollard Street.

I then started looking deeper into the history of the factory building itself to get a better understanding of it, which is when I discovered it used to be a Ammunition Factory in WWI, which is how the drawings one the left link in.

I then looked at the location of the factory on google maps, and with the lines of the roads and rivers I generated shapes which I then used a sowing machine to sow into fabric.

I also used the drawings I drew as some inspiration for what to sow onto the fabric.

I then took it one step further, and started to include color, and as you can see from the images above the main color is pink, to represent Pretty Little Thing, which the factory is begin used for now.

In the above images you might notice that they are outside in nature, and this is because I went to the factory, went to back where the canal is, and collected items left by members of the public, which I then took away, painted pink (to represent the juxtaposition of the well looked after, pink, social factory at the from, compared to the rejected, messy canal at the back of the building) wrapped in thread and then went back to the same area, placed them back, and took photos.

The objects I collected are below (Broken mug, Squashed can, Balloon canister)

Below on the black card you will find attached the mood board I created, showing what inspired me in more depth, artist research, and much more.

Below you will find attached all the mood boards and my developments broken down.

To the right of this text are all the images I took from going back to the back of the factory, with the objects I had re-skinned.

I then, using paint and different colored inks, I created a card filled with marks made by these materials, however the placement of the mark wasn't done by me... I attached some light weight fishing wire to the roof with a brush on the end, and set a fan up to move the brush freely, so in the end I would have an abstract image.

The first image on the left is the first attempt at doing this, and the more I did, the better the result was.

In the second image on the left you'll see more than one image, and see its printed onto acetate, these are all the piece I created, but went I printed them into acetate and printed multiple times just slightly moving the image to get a new image.

From the paint splatter I then traced around the image, only using the negative space (the white part) which you can see directly above, I then flipped the image horizontal and vertical when I copied it so I would end up with the same design printed multiple times, which then again creates a new image.

Then in the second image above you'll see a fashion illustration made by manipulating my original drawings of ammunition printed onto the pain