OCR GCSE Art and Design Themes 2019 Resource Pack - Saatchi Gallery
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OCR GCSE Art and Design Themes 2019
Resource Pack
Themes:
Mirror reflection · vanity · truth · glass · echo · sight · optical illusion · the self
Boxes form · 3D · structure · packaging · storage · strong · containers
Birds animals · wings · feathers · flight · the sky · nests · nature · food · evolution · bones · colours
Signs writing · text · information · instructions · arrows · direction · predictions · cyphers · symbols
Dwellings home · habitat · apartment · house · ghetto · accommodation · lodgings
It is usually the case that Artists and Designers use materials specific to the theme of their work, so they can
illustrate a specific meaning, mood or story. They may also consider composition, scale, colour, text and style.
They will develop their ideas, refine them through testing, reflect and record their work in writing and practical
outcomes and present their work to reflect the theme running through it.
Consider how the artist has made the work. Look at what materials have they used. Why do you think they used these materials? Do you think the medium effectively portrays the concept/ theme of the work? Do you think there is more than one theme in the work? Do you see inspiration/ influences from other artists, art movements or events in the work? The following artists in Black Mirror particularly illustrate some of the themes listed above: Mirror Michael Cline/ Alejandra Prieto/ Scott King/ Justin Craun/ Roman Stanczak/ John Stezaker/ Aleksandra Mir Boxes Michael Cline/ James Howard/ Scott King/ Dominic McGill/ Clayton Brothers/ Steve Bishop/ Des Hughes Birds Michael Cline/ Dominic McGill Signs Jade Townsend/ Bedwyr Williams/ Michael Cline/ James Howard/ Dominic McGill/ Simon Bedwell/ Aleksandra Mir Dwellings Michael Cline/ Anne Speier/ James Howard/ Dominic McGill/ Clayton Brothers
Signs Bedwyr Williams
Williams frequently uses his own autobiographic existence to develop
his sculptures and performances. By doing this he breaks down the
barrier that can sometimes exist between artist and audience.
His work merges art and life with a comedic twist. This makes his
practice relatable and personally insightful for audience members
engaging with the work.
‘Walk a Mile in My Shoes’ celebrates diversity, inclusion, and
community. By using objects which are universal, Williams showcases
the values of tolerance and individualism and makes the work relatable
to everyone. The installation invites audience members to try on the
shoes and become a part of the experience. This again plays with the
idea of community and social inclusion.
Written sign
Signs as labels
number signage
Mirror/ Boxes/ Signs/ Dwellings Michael Cline
Cline’s pastel coloured paintings depict fables in a contemporary style and setting.
Many of his pieces are reminiscent of George Grosz and Pierre Klossowski’s
paintings. Cline is primarily interested in faith, atonement and the American
Dream. He uses unsullied illustration and dreamlike dystopian scenarios to show
scenes of subtle horror, which add a sense of contrast. His images depict an
imperfect world, where the good, the bad and the ordinary act out narratives of
the artist’s imagining.
Whilst Cline’s paintings are completed with unspoiled innocence, works such as
‘Woman In Doorway’ and ‘Police Line’, address uncomfortable subjects like
violence. The perspective of the work also invites the viewer to enter the locations
and settings and highlights the open secrets and closed-door gossip which exists
within the paintings.
Mirror reflection of society
Cardboard boxes in situ
Box as a dwelling place
Placard signs and written signs
Dwellings Anne Speier
Speier’s work is made up of
experimental collage. She will use
glossy colour against B&W to show
contrast and juxtapose images of food
with illustrated characters.
Many of the images are comical
recreations of scenes the artist has
observed in real life.
Speier will combine the ordinary with
the ridiculous, in order to show the
invented and often self-imposed
absurdity of many social interactions.
Using images of food for the bodies
adds humour but also highlights the
domestic setting. These are items
which also influence people and are a
staple in their lives.
Domestic dwelling spaces
Signs Jade Townsend
Whilst the medium is important in Townsend’s work, it is the meaning which
is the focus. Townsend uses satire to explore the idea of the “Boomtown”
and how it can influence our activities and our art. He is interested in the
concept of ‘the art fair’ and how it may have become a parody of itself.
Townsend also plays with space and form, questioning how people react
when viewing work. His work looks to go beyond language, culture, class and
history. Instead his work is constructed in a way which refuses to conform.
• Written signs
Supporting signs
Signs of the future
Hidden signs
Faint signs
Boxes/ Signs/ Dwellings James Howard
Howard uses real text
and image taken from
spam emails found in
his own email junk
folder. He employs
collage to combine the
images and create a
new narrative with
them. In wanting to
keep true to how real
hackers work, Howard uses Photoshop and other kinds of graphic software, in order to create his collages. His work is bright and full
of endless information. The endless narrative of the combined images leads the viewer to feel overwhelmed and saturated, mimicking
the same effect endless junk mail can have. His work is constantly being processed and he often works with urgency in order to try
and collect and use as much information as he can before it disappears.
His work acts like an on-going social commentary, highlighting the vulnerability of the individual and of society as a whole.
Text and image boxes Signs of vulnerability
Boxes of information Signs of saturation
Digital boxes Personal dwellings
Signs of information Invasion of information into dwellings
Mirror Alejandra Prieto
Prieto uses coal to explore themes linked to industrialisation. Her aim
is to reinstate the value of the coal and transform it into an object of
importance again. During the process of including coal within her work,
she discovered a machine which used water to cut through the earthy
substance. Using water to cut the coal makes the material reflective,
which inspired the artist to make a mirror. The scale of the mirror in
turn adds to the idea of vanity, opulence and wealth, thus reinstating
the value of the coal as a high end object. Her work in turn highlights
the paradox of material vs object. During the process Prieto discovered
that the Pre-Columbian civilisation had also used coal to make mirrors.
Mirror as an object of art
Coal mirror
Blurred reflective mirror
Alternative mirror
Large scale mirror eluding to importance and wealth
Boxes/ Birds/ Signs/ Dwellings Dominic McGill
McGill often works on an epic scale, incorporating elements
of collage, drawn imagery and a swirling sea of text. The text
in McGill’s work is sourced from a variety of locations
including clichés, sayings and political speeches. Words and
phrases collide with one another adding a sense of contrast
and implied contradiction. The size of his work makes you
feel like you are entering the eye of a brainstorm when you
stand before it. The use of B&W also emphasises a feeling of
information sharing, like in the press or newspapers.
Boxes of visual and written information
Glass box vitrine
Illustrations of birds and nature
Written signs
Illustrated signs
Illustrations of dwellings
Dwellings of the mind
Mirror/ Boxes Scott King
King originally trained as a Graphic Designer. His work often explores
product, desire and message, looking at how iconic images can become
detached and reduced to representational information.
His work explores political themes and uses installation, photography,
and print to highlight a sense of journalistic image capturing. They are
often tongue in cheek and playful in appearance.
Mirrored surface
Box head
Reflective boxBoxes Steve Bishop
Bishop often uses methods of taxidermy to create his work. He makes his
pieces as “containers for something”. They are also an “embodiment”.
This notion of a sculpture being an object but also a vessel, relates to
‘idolatry’. In combining different materials Bishop highlights the idea of
opposites and how they work together. This includes combining
taxidermy and concrete, where to see the soft fur of an animal matted in
amongst hard concrete becomes quite jarring. The white colour palette in
the piece pictured here also explores the idea of purity.
The piece ‘It’s Hard to Make a Stand’ in contrast explores the process of
readymade assemblage, with the horse made entirely out of foam. In ‘It’s
Hard to Make a Stand’ Bishop is interested in how objects and materials
can function by themselves.
Boxes as standsBoxes/ Dwellings Clayton Brothers
Brothers Christian and Rob Clayton use
painting and installation to create their
work. There is no direct planning in
their work. Instead they work intuitively
to create intensely compacted images,
full of narrative and energy.
Though they work together, the
brothers rarely work on the same
canvas at the same time, nor do they
discuss their work. They will add to and
edit the pieces as they go along, adding
a sense of the communal to the
individual. The way the artist’s work
also adds intensity to the layering of the
paint, with different forms of mark
making explored and interwoven.
The work takes inspiration from their
local environment in California with a
laundrette the setting for the painting pictured above. Motifs, places, figures and gestures reoccur in different paintings, creating a
linked series.
Painted boxes to show culture and location (Tide) Where the artists dwell and how their surroundings
Locations as dwellings influence their workMirror Justin Craun
Craun’s work combines an electric colour
palette with geometric shapes to make
intensely packed scenes.
His paintings always feature human figures,
exploring the interior lives of others and
whether these can be captured and
communicated in an image.
His work sarcastically depicts modern people
in social media ready poses.
There is a sense of realism to his hallucinatory
paintings, which sometimes mimics Picasso’s
‘Primitivism’.
Whilst the colours are bright and sweet in
their saturation, there is a sense of
uneasiness and even drama. Many of the
figures look trapped or staged, as though they are stuck in varying social moments or narratives they cannot escape. Craun is
particularly interested in how social pressures influence people. The predominately pink colour palette in this painting also plays on
the fact that all frozen characters are female.
A sense of mirrored imagery
Mirrored posesSigns Simon Bedwell
Bedwell’s work has an element of fiction
vs fact. He continually engages in a
process of arranging and rearranging to
expose what was previously subliminal in
his found imagery.
Some of his posters have intertwined the
original commercial content so deeply
with the artist’s fictional and aesthetic
alterations that it is hard to detect what
came first. His posters combine found
image and text with those of his own
invention. He uses ClipArt and WordArt
software to make his work, keeping true
to many of the methods used in
advertising. He will also scavenge and
reuse torn posters from billboards, bins
and thrift stores, giving his work a sense
of timeless authenticity.
Adapted signage
Signs of humour
Appropriated signs
Written and visual signs
Playful cultural signsMirror John Stezaker
Stezaker plays with the fabric of photography. He re-examines
the audience’s relationship with it, questioning whether it’s a
documentation, a memory or a symbol of modern culture.
His works are photo collages, using found image to create ‘ready-
mades’. He gathers images, with his collection currently
containing more than 300,000 photographs.
Stezaker’s work is playful but highly effective in prompting the
viewer to consider identity.
In his ‘Marriage’ series, Stezaker fuses together images of men
and women, creating new identities. In the ‘Mask’ series, he
creates new faces by overlaying images of landscapes or
buildings and playing on the subject matter within the image.
The end result is an optical illusion where trees become mouths
and bridges become eyes.
Distorted mirror image
Mirrored identities
Mirror imagesBoxes Des Hughes
Hughes loves to defy conventions and
assumptions about his work. He will
often deliberately manipulate materials
to take on the appearance of one
another.
He is interested in blurring the lines
between the way the object looks and
what it is actually made out of. The
viewer must work to understand the art
and open themselves up to the
confusion it may cause.
The piece pictured here is an example of
how the surface of the body has been
manipulated to look like textured wool
or fabric but is in fact made out of resin.
His work asks the audience to look and
look again.
Box as a stand
Box as an coffin
Box as supportMirror/ Signs Aleksandra Mir
Mir works in B&W, thus mimicking
and parodying newspapers and the
press.
Her work is large in scale and
incorporates strong bold text with
illustration.
The font is often playful, which
masks the frequently dark political/
historical themes being explored,
but there is definitely a sense of
history being told.
Mir works collaboratively,
sometimes sketching out the bones
of the work before a team fills it in.
Her assistants often took on
humorous titles like ‘The
Supervisor of Paper Cutting and
Protector of Fingertips’ and ‘Secretary of Finesse’. The strong contrast of the B&W emphasises the contrast between hot and cold,
light and dark and good and evil.
Mirrored text and illustrations Illustrations of signs
Mirrored messages Large scale format mimicking signage
Strong contrast mirroring themes and B&W Implied signs of symbolismYou can also read
