Public Art

One of the first..and probably one of the most exciting projects we did at college was Constructed Textile project which somehow turned into and amazing yarn bombing collaboration! And if you have never heard of yarn bombing, you should definitely google it..or better click here! But anyway, on the very first day of the project I finally learned how to knit! (some people were already amazing at it! but How?!)..So we hand and machine knitted..we made felt, we made sailing knots..and we also learned how to finger-knit from our friend Anna! And, finger knitting is what took this already great project to a whole new level!

Im not going to go in details about how and why and who came up with this amazing idea because that’s not really that important since it was a collaboration and everyone worked really hard on it (..and also because I just cant remember) but anyway! For the final piece we decided to make a lot of long pieces of finger knitting (It’s surprisingly quick and easy way of knitting!) and some machine knitted pieces and use the idea of yarn bombing to secretly decorate the most popular space in our college! Soo, we took all the pieces we knitted, tied them together and during the lesson we quickly put it up. And this is what it looked like:

And the best part isn’t the fact that when the lesson finished no one could figure out what was it all about and how did it get there but the fact that it made college look more Christmassy (and it was that time of the year) and so we didn’t have to take it down, right after we created it..in fact it was taken down after few months and only because the space was needed for the end of the year show! And most importantly it really was a big part of our college life because since we put it up until the very end we secretly kept adding to it so it was an ongoing project which a believe almost everyone at college really liked and got attached to. Even if they didn’t quite know why it was there! Below I included some more pictures where you can clearly see how it evolved! So I hope you like it, and please look forward to my next post!

Recently at college we were encouraged to do some research about public art as our college comissioned an artist Tim Ward to create a piece of public art in the campus of our college. We were all asked to come up with some creative ideas which is really exciting because everyone can participate in it.

For my research I decided to visit Oxford and together with my friend Anna I went on a journey to look for the Public Art of Oxford. Surprisingly, despite having a map it was quite difficult to find some of the pieces of artwork. However, I can’t complain because finding ‘Grilles and Railings’ by Jon Mills after searching for it for about an hour, giving up, and searching for it again felt more like finding a hidden treasure rather than just decorative gateway. We spend 4,5 hours and found 6 pieces of the public art…and two or three pieces of art which is also in the public but I guess it doesn’t qualify as public art. Enjoy!