Illustrated Menagerie Exhibition

Interview with the University News.

Watch an interview with three final year students exhibiting in the Menagerie. 

Illustrated Menagerie Exhibition

The posters and leaflets for the exhibition have been designed and produced by our final year students Dale Silvester, Paige Jones and Ollie Tubb and hand screen printed in the print workshop. Big thanks to all of you involved and for your highly professional approach.

Meet all the artists involved in the exhibition at this Friday's opening event in Space gallery - Eldon Building, Winston Churchill Avenue, Portsmouth PO1 2DJ

See more of the event and reserve a place here;

Call for Submissions - Illustrated Menagerie Exhibition

We would like to invite you to submit artwork for our upcoming exhibition: 'Illustrated Menagerie’. The Illustrated Menagerie project itself  is coming up to its 5th birthday now and will be holding an exhibition of Illustrated Menagerie works, to which we would like to invite you to submit some work. Deadline for submission is Monday 15th December.

If you would be interested in this please find the exhibition brief and all relevant details. Feel free to contact us with any questions you may have. We look forward to hearing from you!

Crocodiles

For this unit I looked into crocodiles and how their society operates. I found out that it functions in a strict hierarchical manner and wanted to look into illustrating this. I decided to look at how it might relate to human behaviours which also demonstrate social tiers, so I was thinking about social satire which gives commentary on these behaviours (such as Spiegelman's "Maus"). My final illustration is in ink - similar to the styles of a lot of satirical cartoonists. It involves a lot of crocodiles parodying human behaviours, and also includes a small reference to a myth about crocodiles that I briefly looked into.

The Gorilla

I chose to look at these ground-dwelling herbivores because they are powerful and intelligent. They live in social groups and often display gentle, human-like behaviour. Some able to learn basic sign language and communicate with humans. Would you believe 1 gorilla has the strength of 4-8 human men. It's incredible feats like these that made me want to study this magnificent creature. It's just a terrible shame that some species of gorilla are still endangered today. 

Tiger

I picked the Tiger for this project as they have long been one of my favourite animals, being such a feared and respected hunter, and also the mascot to my Rugby team. I used a mixture of mediums throughout the course of the project, but really wanted to reflect the areas where the Tiger can be found, namely China, Asia and Eastern Russia. But after discovering the Chinese governments dual policy of both protecting and hunting these graceful animals, I wanted to represent them as the product that China seems to think they are. So I tried my hand at some Chinese paintings and some came out better than others, but I did include the bar code logo to reflect the commercial use of these beautiful creatures.

Blue Footed Booby

For my research methodology I picked the blue footed booby. I was interested by this creature firstly because of its name and vibrant blue foot and then after some research its funky mating dance it uses to attract partners.