UNIT X | GROUP WORK | LINES OF ENQUIRY

Group collaboration is something I was quite sceptical about at the beginning of Unit X, even though I do enjoy working with others, I was unsure how such a project would allow each member too develop and explore their skill set. Luckily I have loved working with the people in my group, as individuals I feel we have strongly understood the important abilities that make a well functioning team. Although initially we all had a variety of different ideas, we as a group were able to decipher those ideas, knowing when to push something forward or when to leave it behind, which is a task I feel some of the other groups struggled with. My strongest connection within the team has been with Katie, who has worked along side me as the structural members of our group. Due to the fact that myself and Katie have become good friends since starting university, this has allowed us to feel immediatly comfortable with each others working styles, an important factor that has allowed us to extract the most from each others strengths.

The key developments within our practice almost always arose from the group critique/tutorial sessions we had. By openly discussing our development and plans with our peers and tutors, this allowed us to view our project from a external prospective, which helped to decipher flaws or complications we hadn't yet noticed. The crits that have taken place haven't always been so positive, there have been many that have left me deflated and de motivated. However, looking back now, taking on board the opinions and criticisms' only allowed us to expand the ideas that were our strongest. This constant input allowed me to develop one of the most important skills I have learnt within Unit x... to REFINE.

By breaking down our ideas and simplifying them, this allowed us as a group to get the most out of the process' we were undertaking, teaching us that it is more about the quality and specifics of the ideas you choose to pursue. Initially it was not so easy to come to terms with refining ideas, as a group we have encountered various struggles and at times we were brought to question ideas that had played a big part in our development.

The use of light has been a concept that has played a leading role within the development of both the structure and the garment and has also been a driving point for many of our ideas throughout the project. During a challenging tutorial in week 7, we were required to ask the question, What will our project be without light?? At first we were all very adamant about the idea of removing light from our project and it became very hard to envision how our project would evolve without it. However, I feel this once again demonstrates how well we worked as a team, we were able to take the negative and turn it into a positive, all by striping back our ideas and thinking of ways to overcome the issues. We firstly began by looking back at our original colour scheme, bright fluorescent colours that we had extracted from the illuminations and casinos of Blackpood and combined this with gathering new research and inspirations. Broadening our contextual references at this point became a really helpful tool,  gathering information from fashion, fine art and photography.It was at this point where we disovered we could still achieve the overall neon look that we had hoped for, just by going a different way about it. We began looking into the combination of neon paints to create contrasting colours both within the structure and garment prints and have been Inspired by the Spring/Summer 13' collection by Simone Roche, leading us to look into the effects of using laser cut fluorescent acrylic within our structure. 

SERENDIPITY | Laser cut acrylic to be included structure