The Heat is on.

have three modules to do and one is my Personal Skills and the other two are my Creative Practice Final Portfolio and Degree show.

Personal Skills- I will be completing my photography research and skills.

I will be writing a blog, which will be on here, Creating a brochure/booklet type reference hardcopy as an 'idiots guide to photographing your artwork' and call it Tam's Tips or something like that.

This will be printed and given to the Tutors and hopefully used for students at Writtle University and help them to be able to take good pictures of their artwork.

I will use layman terms and also add a slight introduction to a DLSR camera and what the main functions that can be used.

There will be help in setting up a studio and building a light-box if needed.

I will also do a youtube film on how to take a good photo of your artwork to accompany it. I intend to use my children in this and add some much needed humour. 

The other two modules will kind of join together as they are research, blogging and reflective writing on a final piece and then the final piece with a presentation on how I got there etc.

After speaking to my tutors I have been given some artists to look up and found their work very interesting.

As my initial idea - The Shit Pipe with the body sculpted into it was looked at I was also given Nicolas Deshayes as an artist I should research.

I found his Thames Water 2016, work resonated with the sewage pipes. Deshayes uses cast iron to create and resemble intestines, these are connected to the gallery walls and heated with flowing hot water, basically they are radiators. But his meaning of this is that the Thames water is connected to us humans more that we think. Maybe the saying that the water you drink 'has been through 20 kidneys' before you drink it is true...?

Fascinating stuff and his approach to these pieces with being able to touch them and feel body heat from them makes them incredibly effective and a talking point. 

I like his simple yet bold way that he looks at the connection with water and us. How important our bodily functions are and how vital it is to understand this connection. 

Another artist who used heat in his work is Miroslav Balka  - and I was fortunate to see and touch work a few years back at the White Cube Mason's Yard.

Balka's work was in a room underneath the main reception and when you have descended the stairs you come face to face with a massive metal wall that spans the whole room across, which looms over you like a giant steel barrier.

Composed of corrugated metal sheets, the walls of this structure are heated to a temperature of 45 degrees Celsius, this is the point in the body at which blood will coagulate and enzymes turn toxic.

Balka's wall make a reference to the increase in national borders and control within them and the heat to the escalating crisis of global warming.