Rebecca East UWE Illustration

 During a trip to Berlin last summer, I was fortunate enough to visit The Transdisciplinary Project Space or 'TopLab'; a facility in the city centre which works as a collaborative working space between artists and scientists. Here they work together to creative inventive solutions to modern day issues, particularly around sustainability.  When I visited, the majority of their work was currently revolving around the use of fungi as a material for production and construction. They showed us how fungi can be grown in moulds to make things like packing material for shipping and even bricks and panels for insulation in buildings.  We were toured around the lab and project space, a space that perfectly exemplified the idea of 'poetic science' as art materials and lab equipment lined the shelves and concept design sketches drawn up by the resident artists covered the walls. We were also shown the growing space in the basement; a cool dark room where large grow-bags filled with...

 I'm interested at looking into the use of fungi and mushroom imagery throughout folklore and fairytales. I want to see if there's any room for crossover with the more scientific based research I've done. Mushrooms make a lot of appearances in fairytale imagery and historically they've had lots of different meanings and significance to different cultures, exploring these ideas could lend me some new inspirations for my own work. I think a good example of these potential for this crossover of science and folklore comes from Fairy Circles; the name given to a perfect circle of mushrooms that grows commonly in forests during the summertime. In British folklore these circles were the spots where fairies would dance after a rainstorm, and people were warned not to enter them as humans would fall into a hundred year sleep if they did.  Scientifically speaking, we now know that these circles form due to the pattern of growth of the mycelium below the surface. The fairy circle ...

Research: Fungi in Folklore TopLab Futurium Museum Trying and Failing to Grow My Own Mushrooms Evaluative Statement

For our anthology asignment, my group and I decided to look at the theme of visions of the future, in response to the brief of 'The Unseen'. As well as sharing the same over-arching themes, we also wanted our stories to have aesthetic coherence in the zine, so we decided to stick to a mostly monochromatic colour palette with accented use of colour. I created a short story exploring the idea of remote warfare, and toyed with the idea that in the future conflicts could be conducted like video games, like a very exaggerrated version of the kind of drone warfare currently used today. I wanted to create an image of the future where people fighting in wars are so detatched from their actions that they treat the very real people and place they're attacking as if they're just enemies in a video game with no real consequence.  I also made the cover for our zine, it's supposed to depict TV screens with distorted ad abstract references to the content of our stories on them.  

After the first few workshops of the module, I knew I wanted to create a 3D piece inspired by the work of Fraces Glessner Lee, and I was very excited about the idea of making a large scale dollhouse depicting come kind of macabe scene.  I've worked with 3D miniatures and dioramas before and thoroughly enjoyed it, but I'd never made something on this scale, so I was very excited about the prospect but had a lot of logistical aspects to work out first. I looked at a few different artists and representations of dioramas for inspiration and insight into how to portray these kinds of scenes. Being a horror fan, the miniatures used in the film 'Hereditary' instantly came to mind as a reference not only for constructing dioramas, but for how they can be used to strengthen certain narratives in film and photography. Initially I planned on building the house myself, as I had a certain layout of rooms in mind that I thought I would need to construct myself to achieve, however I f...

 Below is a photo-tour of my final outcome. I made a dollhouse depicting a crime scene in a family home. The wooden dollhouse was purchased online and then painted and furnished by myself. All of the details including wall coverings, floorings, furniture and decorations were made by me.  I ended up deciding against putting any figures into the house as I wan't to create the idea of a crime scene that the viewer can 'investigate' and piece together small details to decide what they think may have happened. I think this is a much more interesting and engaging narrative device than simply having a scene being acted out by figurines, which was my original idea.