After a good turn out, my group met up today as proposed in our last meeting and had a look around each individuals studio. We did this to get an idea of each others thoughts on appropriation and the work they had been making for our exhibition. It also gave us a sense of scale of each piece so that we can figure out how to curate our exhibition to fit the size we may be given. It was interesting to see how each member of the group had interpreted 'appropriation'.
Before this we had a brief look at some of the images and statements people had written about appropriation, as only a few had managed to do this. We came to the agreement that writing what we all thought appropriation to be clashes and we were pretty much giving the same definition. We have now agreed to re-write about how appropriation links to the work we are making now, and we will post this with the images we have selected, on the Facebook group.

As we looked around the studios at each others work there was a vast range of collage ideas, to paintings, to sculpture.

Emily Straw

Emily had used images from fashion magazines that had caught her eye for not looking like clothes, but for their likeness to something else. She would then cut that particular segment of paper out and arrange it in another perspective

Ellie Algieri

We had been told Ellie was rather lost in her project so searched for simple words to spark her off. She collaged words to begin with, but then like Emily, resorted to fashion magazines. Here she cut out segments of models faces and arranged them back to where they were positioned in the first place, but noticeably with pieces missing, and layering features from different models up to create one face

Kiran Sandhu

Kiran's work links to appropriation in the fact that she is manipulating old images that she took in the first term of her course. She has chosen to stitch and embroider into these portraiture photographs to highlight certain areas, and also distract from the black and white images with brightly coloured threads

Ed Florance

Money is Ed's chosen theme, as he discussed with us in the previous meeting. He chose this theme as 'we all could trade another way, but we choose to use money'. In his last project he produced a working sculpture of a printer that imitated printing an endless roll of money. This brings the idea of appropriation in as he is essentially duplicating something that has already been made. The work Ed showed us during the group crit was a large, accurate painting of a £10 note. Ed explained to us that the paint he used changes under UV light. I personally think his work reflects appropriation strongly, especially with the idea that if you mass produce something it looses its value, so this questions the role of money

Michael Koropisz

Michael has been working on pieces that reflect old classical paintings. He initially started copying well known paintings such as 'The Girl With the Pearl Earring' to get a hang of what techniques these past painters had used to create their pieces. He has then painted members of his own family in this style, making them look grand and eerily like monarchs

Nathan Lee

Collage is Nathan's chosen medium, he has been quite experimental by re-arranging images from fashion magazines, with images from National Geographic. This clash provides us with an image that you take a double look at, as the two images are very different, but work together well. I personally felt that the images show the differences from Western and Eastern culture.

At the end of the crit, we all agreed to keep the facebook group more active with ongoing progress within work and ideas to help each other out. We also agreed to all have posted our submission for our collaborative piece before our next meeting.