Since deciding I didn't want to pursue the theme of swarms, I again was faced with the issue of having a very open subject to tackle ('space'). I decided eventually that the Yorkshire Sculpture Park might be a good place to visit in relation to space, purely because it has outside, inside, enclosed and open spaces, and, of course, sculpture, which often interacts with space in significant ways. This might be simply the fact that a sculpture is filling a space, or that the sculpture includes interesting spaces or use of spaces in it's construction or placement.
Seeing as I hadn't yet narrowed my theme down a great deal I had no real starting point once I arrived, other than to wander around and do some observational drawing to see what happened, if anything. There was an exhibition on of work by the Swiss artist - 'Not Vital' which was comprised of mainly sculptural/ 3D works, and I began drawing them. This is where I began to narrow my theme down to some more concrete ideas.
Firstly, whilst I was completing drawings from his work and it's placement in the exhibition space, I began to feel uncomfortable basing my own image making and ideas on another artists work. I therefore started trying to obscure the fact that these were drawings of sculptures by drawing from perspectives which might abstract the view, resulting in the creation of drawings which were contextually elusive and shape based.
This approach lead me to to explore further the notion of perspective within space, and what the image maker's view or perspective of a space can do for the composition of an image.
I started to do observational drawings looking through holes (in objects such as Henry Moore sculptures) and windows or other general structural gaps, which created very unusual depictions of whatever view I might be studying, again often simplifying the shapes down to further interrogate the compositional elements of that view and increase the ability of a drawing to retain interest and exist in it's own right, without contextual information required to evaluate it's effectiveness.
I did explore other methods of drawing/ recording information such as sound mapping and collecting ephemera but found they became fairly redundant once I had latched onto this train of thought.
I have been left with several roads I might want to take with regards to my picture book, all under this overarching theme of perspective/ view and how it changes the appearance of a space, or how it can be used to abstract a space to create interesting compositions and imagery:
Looking through holes (e.g. windows, doors, structural gaps etc) and how that creates or alters a certain view. Also, since the trip, I have been thinking about how framing a view (e.g. through a window) flattens perspective, converting a 3D environment into a 2D composition which could be expressed through simplistic shape driven imagery.
What are the compositional elements which constitute a 'nice view'? Can they be found in unlikely places (e.g. inside, in the corner of a room).
In general, removing context and detail to create abstract compositions.
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