DEGREE SHOW PORTFOLIO by Alexandra Masters

ALEXANDRA MASTERS ART---WORDS---IDEAS --------------------------------------------a lexandra .masters@me.com 0 7 7 8 8 2 5 1 6 5 0 www.cargocollective.com/masters

CURRICULUM VITAE: V I S U A L C . V . -------------------------------------

IMPLEMENTATION PROJECT: THE STORY OF NEWS -------------------------------------

LIVE PROJECT: PIKE TEXTILES -------------------------------------

RESEARCH PROJECT: S PA C E O S M O S I S -------------------------------------

ADDITIONAL WORK: ILLUSTRATIONS AND W R I T I N G S -------------------------------------

S PA C E O S M O S I S : AN EXPLORATION OF TWO SPACES ----------------------------------------------------------

T H E S T O RY O F N E W S : TOMORROW’S CHAPTER ----------------------------------------------------------

THE CONTENTS OF MY C.V demonstrates that I have worked alongside my studies for most of my adult education. The process of juggling academic and paid work is a matter of excellent time management and an unrelenting hard work ethic.

CURRICULUM VITAE: V I S U A L C . V . -----------------------------------

Although the waitressing work is the least relevant for my future career aspirations, it is one of my most proud achievements. Initially working as a commis I was responsible for running food, checking stock levels, all bins, polishing and serving the waiters. Such menial tasks have meant that I see no job too small or too hard. I was swiftly promoted to waitress where I received 95% and above mystery diners. That said, I have worked hard in both my studies and within part-time work, therefore as a creative and focused individual I am ready for a career. To surmise my key attributes: I am artistic in taking lateral approaches to tasks, I am passionate about language and the correct and creative use of it, and I am forever filled with ideas.

ALEXANDRA MASTERS A

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alexandra.masters@me.com 0 7 7 8 8 2 5 1 6 5 0 w w w. c a r g o c o l l e c t i v e . c o m /m a s t e r s

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------EDUCATION ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------BA FASHION COMMUNICATION & PROMOTION - Nottingham Trent University

OCT. 2011- MAY. 2014

Live projects for Pretty Polly {taken forward by client}, Unilever and Pike Textiles. FOUNDATION DEGREE IN ART AND DESIGN - University for the Creative Arts

SEP. 2010 - JUN. 2011

A-LEVELS - Farnborough Sixth Form College

SEP. 2008 - JUN. 2010

English A, Psychology B, Photography B, Fine Art (AS) A, Textiles (AS) A ‘Gifted and Talented’ Assisted designers with an installation for a new Art & Design building. GCSEs - Weydon School, Farnham

SEP. 2003 - JUL. 2008

10 A*-C including English Literature A, English Language A and Art A

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------PAID EMPLOYMENT ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------THE CONRAN SHOP, FULHAM

JUN. 2013 – JAN. 2014

Ensuring products are merchandised in an aesthetically pleasing style and assisting customers with their purchases. FOUR, LONDON

ART --- WORDS --- IDEAS

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OCT. 2013 - OCT. 2013

Working closely with the founder, textile designers and stylist, I was in charge of art directing, shooting and editing images for an exclusive line of luxury garments for the print focused brand (an extension of JRC Imports) in honour of Westfield Shopping Centre’s anniversary. HOBBS, NOTTINGHAM

DEC. 2012 – JUN. 2013

Expanded my knowledge of the in-store experience, working with products of both quality and style. THE LARDER ON GOOSEGATE, NOTTINGHAM

NOV. 2012 – JUN. 2013

A term-time job that required a high level of skill with people and organisation. CÔTE BRASSERIE, FARNHAM

JUL. 2010 – SEP. 2012

I thrived under pressure and enjoyed the inter-personal elements of the job. Excellent track record of mystery diners – 95% and above. I started as a commis and was swiftly promoted to waitress.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------WORK EXPERIENCE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------GEORGIO ARMARNI, LONDON - BUYING OFFICE

DEC. 2011 - DEC. 2011

I developed my computer skills handling data, organising designs and creating look-books for visual merchandisers. MATTHEW WILLIAMSON & HENRY HOLLAND, LONDON FASHION WEEK

FEB. 2011 - FEB. 2011

Assisted back stage for A/W 2011 shows, working in a fast paced and pressurised environment. JRC IMPORTS, LONDON – TEXTILE DESIGN TEAM

JUL. 2011 - JUL. 2011

Textile Design Team I assisted designers working with designs and dealing with fabric, whilst also sourcing inspiration at markets and in books.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------INTERESTS & SKILLS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Writing, Reading, Fashion, Illustrating, Drawing, Food & Wine, Film, Running. Adobe Creative Suite Microsoft Office Suite

{Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator} {Word, Excel, Powerpoint}

{REFERENCE ON REQUEST}

IMPLEMENTATION PROJECT: THE STORY OF NEWS: TOMORROW’S CHAPTERS --------------------------------------

An exploration of how in contemporary society the newspaper can promote seeking knowledge through communicating information and news stories in a visually arresting and fashionable way.

THIS IMPLEMENTATION PROJECT concerns a key passion of my own seeking of self-improvement; the need to be interested and informed with worlds outside ones own comfortable bubble.

to the newspaper, it has the potential to benefit both individuals and the surrounding society. The following introduction communicates the project in a more informed manner:

I have sought to create a more beautiful news. The amount of young people who base their knoweldge on the Daily Mail’s insideous and bigoted site is concerning. Particularly with Instagram’s new 15 second news feature, more questions are being posed about how we consume news. These are not poisonous as additions, but if they are the sole platform of understanding the world, they are dangerous.

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On Radio Four’s Today Programme Helen Lewis said it’s a bit like sugar and ‘a bit of sugar on top of your porridge is lovely, but if you only eat sugar, that’s very bad for you’. We all seem to know a little about a lot – we only consume the sugar. The aim was to use the newspaper as a stylish addition to ones warbrobe, in the attempt to encourage the seeking of knowledge. In creating a radical approach

IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The Gazette, a single sheet broadsheet paper, was the only paper published in England for fourteen years (Pettegree 2014 p.233). The idea that we could rely on one source to acquire news today is inconceivable. The Gazette served a society of active citizens, as opposed to mindless shoppers (Marr 2014 p.28); a society that would read, understand and engage with ink-covered atoms of news. It was all society had to understand the surrounding world - unlike today. Today, far from information on mulch, we enter a complex multimedia age (Pettegree 2014 p.1). The way we consume, communicate and promote information is changing; the distinctions between mediums in today’s visual landscape are dissolving (Staples 2002 p.151). Dissolving so that publishing

and the wider spheres that surround have transferred from products to services, from newspapers to news organizations (Franchi 2014 p.166). This has caused a necessary focus on the way content is cooked and presented whilst surrounded by a disorientating plethora of data (Franchi 2014 p.76). Within this data filled world the newspaper is a unique, finite and ephemeral platform for communication, which has the potential to offer real value to the readers mental substance and physical appearance. In the words of author Garrison Keillor (2007), the newspaper ‘gives you a whole rich vocabulary of gesture’. It is nonetheless increasingly overlooked when compared with the immediacy of digital platforms. It is since the birth of digital that society is more informed than ever (Marr 2014 p.28), but information has never been so undervalued. THE FUTURE REQUIRES NEW WAYS TO EFFECTIVELY COMMUNICATE AND PROMOTE THE SEEKING OF INFORMATION, AND THE UNDERSTANDING OF IT.

THE NEWSPAPER: CHAPTER’S TEXTURES

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LIVE PROJECT: PIKE TEXTILES -----------------------Innovating the traditional textiles pattern book.

UNTIL NOW, ANY CHANGES WITHIN THE INTERIOR INDUSTRY have largely been within retailing and distribution, rather than innovations of production (Madigan and Munro 2006 p.222); Pike Textiles understands this in the need to innovate the pattern book. Upon initiating a project with Pike, strategies were developed around a selection of key words: luxury, quality, self-image, mature and highly discerning. When applying these words for innovating the traditional pattern book to reflect the luxurious nature of the bespoke interiors industry, a paradigm of strategies were established: MAKE IT VERSATILE, MAKE IT INNOVATIVE AND MAKE IT A STORY. When in conversation with John Allen (2014) to discuss a brand specific approach Allen (2014) analysed how the focus was consumer and not trade orientated: Thinking it through what we are anticipating is the behaviour of the future consumer and developing tools that appeals to today’s consumer, therefore,

it’s about changing consumer behaviour, because they’ll behave with what’s in front of them. Some fabric houses really respond to what the retailer tells them to do. So it’s the retailer that guides consumer behaviour. So Heal’s does just that. Is response, a meeting was arranged with Pia Benham (2014), Head of Fabrics and Design at Heal’s who echoed Allen (2014) when explaining that Heal’s approached their fabric department at their Tottenham Court Road store ‘thinking about customer experience, rather than a trade action’. Before focusing on future strategies, reflection on the research previously undertaken was necessary to bring forward informed suggestions. The strategies my team and I proposed bespoke for Heal’s was a quilt in Heal’s 1810 fabric range - used as both a wall hanging and malleable tool for consumer and retailer, an innovative but simple phone app for the consumer to use, and a faux story place within a leaflet and poster to inspire the consumer in-store and at home.

HEAL’S + MAKE IT VERSATILE, MAKE IT INNOVATIVE, MAKE IT A STORY

CONSUMER RESEARCH

MAKE IT VERSATILE MAKE IT INNOVATIVE MAKE IT A STORY

THE ART OF LUXURIOUS FABRICS

INNOVATING THE TRADITIONAL PATTERN BOOK

HAVING ALWAYS STUDIED ART, through osmosis it has always coloured by approach to studying Fashion Communication and Promotion. With conversations surrounding the emergence of ‘showrooming’ whereby stores will increasingly become brand cathedrals as consumers try in-store and buy online, it seemed timely to compare the retail and gallery space. To introduce the project, the introduction to the essay expresses my intentions most approprately:

RESEARCH PROJECT: S PA C E O S M O S I S --------------------------A Visual Research Document exploring the relationship between the gallery and the retail space.

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ON WALKING INTO THE VAST, steel skeleton of contemporary art, one asks questions surrounding modern arts maturing: beautifying capitalist consumption; our fatter and flatter globe; artistic playgrounds; questionable engagement; art’s new de regueur for the masses; consumerist churches; packaged experiences; art and fashion. When Sir Nicholas Serota opened the doors to Tate Modern at the turn of the century, contemporary art zaniness and a new attitude that once simmered around the edges of art, became packaged and official; new art, for a new society, open to all (Tate Modern is 10! 2010). Tate acted as a symbol of change in society, moving from the age of Thatcherism that expressed ‘There is no such thing as society’ (Keay

1987) to a new public that swarmed into the Turbine hall to think, act, play and purchase, en masse. Margaret Thatcher ironically launched the careers of art collectors, such as the notorious Charles Saatchi, and arguably, there was a paradigm shift as students from renowned institutions created art for the art market, and not for arts sake (Franscina 2013, p. 4). Naturally, art’s inventive creations play into capitalisms hands, offering new ideas to sell as commercial goods (Perry 2013). This relationship between art and commerce is tangible, though at first fragile, complex and diaphanous. It may be argued that art needs commerce, and commerce needs art. Art once distanced itself from reality, when frames were laid out like expensive bungalows in the white cube (O’Doherty 1999, p. 29), now pieces are not always in frames, not always in white cubes, and a novelty version is sitting in the gallery shop waiting for a mantelpiece in Middle-England. When Takashi Murakami offered a pristine array of Louis Vuitton handbags at the centre of his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA 2007), the connection between culture and commerce was grotesquely overt, both embracing and exploiting his brand of art. Art offers fashion a whole sector of intellectuals and aesthetic conscious

individuals, and at the zenith of a myriad of elements sits the annual circus Frieze Art Fair, fast becoming a playground for fashion and art alike (Judah 2013b). From Frieze to Louis Vuitton, both the gallery and the retail space attract a visitor/consumer with the same aim; pursuing beauty to fill a void. This void can be furthered both by the alienation of the gallery and the need to consume ghastly plastic (James 2013), therefore experience is now seminal. A white cube no longer suffices; not gold frames lined up like expensive bungalows, nor racks of fast consumables to dress-up our shells. We require visceral playgrounds to interact, view and purchase. Like the Gutai movement prompting the redundancy of the paintbrush (Birnbaum and Obrist 2010, p. 302), stores are prompting the redundancy of the stale rail. Philosopher Alain de Botton (2013, p. 80) argues that in order to improve our wellbeing, art should enhance and add meaning in our culture of consumption; gone are the days of pure function, for we have the world-wide-web for that. Through osmosis, these two bedfellows and globalised industries are learning to use each other, in a tumultuous love affair that is growing and maturing into equilibrium.

ADDITIONAL WORK: ILLUSTRATIONS AND WRITINGS -----------------------------------WWW.CARGOCOLLECTIVE.COM/MASTERS