2014 saw the anniversary of the 1st world war,
and one of the top theatre makers, Joan Littlewood’s birth. In 1963 she
developed a stage adaption of ‘Oh, What a Lovely War!’ – An epic musical that
highlighted false ideologies / propaganda about WW1 in comparison to what it
was actually like. Our college teamed up with RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art) where Joan Littlewood attended, to produce an exhibition for the local community
themed around WW1, ‘Oh, What a Lovely War’ and Joan Littlewood’s biography. We
were required to develop ideas for and produce a theatre-related product for
this display.
The plan of the exhibition i.e. the layout was a collaborative
process between our entire Foundation Art & Design class. In the first few
weeks of planning we discussed ideas and potential problems about the arrangement,
as well as devising a list of what we thought should be included in the exhibition.
Some of the things we thought of were food and drink for guests, information about
the exhibition, a variety of work and possibly a craft workshop for people such
as the college’s Saturday art club to take part in.
With this in mind, we broke up into smaller groups – each one
covering a different aspect of theatre: makeup, costume, set design, scenic
art, prop making / puppetry, film + photography and marketing. Since I’m
interested in graphic communication and illustration, I decided to join the
marketing team along with 3 other people. Tackling organisation in our group
wasn’t a problem as there wasn’t that many of us, so it was easy to share and
combine our ideas into a group effort as well as undertake individual projects.
We also nominated someone to be head of the team which turned out to be a good
idea as they provided direction and general guidance with our concept
development, all though we all contributed equally.
Being part of the marketing group meant that we had to
produce promotional material for the event, as well as outcomes to be displayed
in the exhibition itself. We were inspired by WW1 propaganda posters, and
mainly developed our ideas through printmaking techniques such as lino and
monotype since this is how old posters are likely to have been made when modern
print methods such as lithography didn’t exist. Whilst experimenting with this,
I made a collage of all our lino cuts in my sketchbook and the rest of the team
thought that would be a good idea for our exhibition posters and leaflets, and
so we continued trying several layouts and colours until we reached our final
design(s).
We didn’t encounter many problems on the journey, only minor
ones such as lettering coming out backwards on prints but we all learnt from
our mistakes. The only major problem was how we were going to fill the space in
the gallery since we could only judge what wall space would be available until
the last minute when we could physically see what the other groups had
produced. In the last few weeks of production we saw that the scenic art would
take up most of the wall space, especially since two of the walls in the
gallery were made of glass so there were only two walls available. We overcame
this by deciding to nail our work onto wooden crates, which personally I feel
was more effective then presenting them on the wall because it was a unique and
fresh idea, and also fitted with the iconography WW1 – the exhibition’s theme.
I was put in charge of creating labels for each piece in the
gallery by our course leader. I spoke to
my team mates and we decided to use individual segments of our prints and
combine them with text in a typewriter font to emphasise the era. I went round
and ‘interviewed’ all the groups to find out their processes and inspirations,
then typed this up and stuck the text and print to card.
I also took the project in an individual direction to focus
on typography, as I mentioned I am interested in illustration and type is a big
part of this, and also I hadn’t played around with letter forms much since
starting the foundation course and saw this as a good opportunity to do so. I
experimented with materials and lettering in my sketchbook through a variety of
media, and I liked the idea of making letters from masking tape and then
working into them with other materials. I pushed this idea even further and
used the masking tape letters as stencils, and also tried different types of
tape such as duct tape and parcel tape. For the exhibition I decided to create
a mixed media canvas as I used to involve myself in the mixed media arts and
crafts movement as a hobby. I sketched out several composition ideas, then
developed one by combing it with elements of other concepts. I made my final
outcome on a 25x20cm canvas with parcel paper, card, ribbon, acrylic paint, hot
glue and masking tape. I will admit my piece was a bit rushed and I think I could’ve
developed my ideas in more detail, but I was happy with the outcome.
In terms of the exhibition plans, I sketched out some layout
ideas and incorporated design elements inspired by 'Oh, What a Lovely War!' such
as the red ribbon that guided a soldier through the fog at the end, as well as separating
backstage and front stage groups. We measured the space and took into
consideration where the projector would be. When it came to installing the
final exhibition no one really followed a specific plan, we just tried placing mannequins
and our crates etc. in various places and saw what looked best in the space. We considered how it would look from both
inside walking around the exhibition, as well as the glass window at the front
of the college.
We held a private viewing of the exhibition, and guests such
as people working for the ‘Artists Access to Art Colleges’ aka the AA2A project visited and gave us
the feedback that they were impressed by our high achievement and they would be
willing to run a workshop for us to explore theatre making in more detail. RADA
employees were also invited to this viewing but unfortunately never showed up.
After the private viewing the gallery was open to our main target audience –
the public – specifically those interested in the war and/or theatre.
I think the exhibition
was very successful; we utilized the gallery space well by filling as much as
we could without it looking clustered, and you could see a clear link between
all the pieces as we followed the same themes of WW1, ‘Oh, What a Lovely War!’ and
Joan Littlewood’s life. This was apparent through muted colour, horror / period
imagery and the distressing of certain materials. This meant we successfully met
the criteria that was set at the beginning in September / October. Overall it
was a very enjoyable experience and SI loved collaborating with other students
in my class since we do a lot of individual work.
