Well my last semester is upon me and at the moment I am in two minds. Two minds on how I feel about leaving and also with my mind state of workload.
I have been battling over the recent months on looking forward to finishing and also realising that my full time education will be soon coming to an end. University is a weird and wonderful place, days of getting away with childish antics and then switching across to ‘I’m too old for this…’
Workload for my last semester, well I keep on flicking between panic mode and the laid back mode of ‘its all gonna be fine’; when I’m doing design work all want to do is write an essay while when I am doing written work all I want to is design, its so much easier.. right?!
Eli Lotar – La Villette Abattoir (Aux abattoirs de la Villette), 1929
Anyway, my final project has taken a completely new route to designing and how to visualise a project. It started off as more of a research project, and that of a science project! I was making crystals in egg shells, learning the art of making caramel to model forms using the caramel and also explore how extracting a few cells from the shoulder of a cow and growing them in three months into a beef burger… not your average project.
I have been fully challenged at times, knowing when to call it quits on research and transpose all the information into my design. As my tutor explained to me in my last tutorial before the Christmas break, ‘treat it like a recipe, you have the ingredients so be selective with what you put into the mixing bowl, create a master piece’. Simple analogy for getting out of the obsession of just being a collector of information, especially when all the information you seem to be crazy about is abattoirs!
As much as I have been disturbed and moved by all of the visual elements of my abattoir research I have grow to understand their beauty. Photographers Eli Lotar and Alastair Philip Wiperhave both demonstrated abattoirs in different lights, Lotar with the dark humour with how he lays out the cow’s hooves while Wiper shows the openness of a modern day abattoir. Could these buildings and processes have a centre stage view within society? The majority of us eat this meat so is it not fair that we understand and celebrate these animal’s lives, instead of asking ‘Can you pass the ketchup?’.
Alistair Philip Wiper
I still have a few months to debate over this debate myself but at the moment I feel that we should know what is going on; not only for our own welfare but for the welfare of all involved. I hope my project contributes to this growing discourse and will no doubt become a major debate in the coming years, with the existing demand of meat being at an all time high and the continuing growth in population where are we going to go with our meat production?
Have I learnt much during my masters? Well I think so, and like with anything, it is only as good as the effort you put in and I have been pushing myself several elements on this course, the areas I want to improve on and also one which will help me get a job… ah a job! That is next on my to do list…
