Shakespeare's Animals Exhibition

We are very excited to have now installed a new group exhibition piece for Shakespeare's Animals, part of the upcoming Much Ado about Portsmouth Festival (maap.port.ac.uk) marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.

The work is a large scale group student piece and depicts some of the (over 4000!) animals which Shakespeare alluded to in his writings and will be gracing one wall of the Portsmouth Guildhall's Freda Swain room from now until 7th June 2016. During that time, Portsmouth Cultural Trust tells us, thousands of visitors will be able to see and read about the work and the students, and we hope, through coming to this blog, be able to give us feedback too. We think the diversity and talent of our first year students is well represented in this group show, as well as the explorative and questioning approach to illustration which is central to the BA (Hons) Illustration course here at Portsmouth.

We will also have the chance to celebrate with an opening event on Friday April 22nd at 6pm - 7.45 in the Guildhall, Freda Swain room. Please let us know if you'd like to come along!

My Dog Sighs

Lost and Found workshop

Many thanks to My Dog Sighs, who joined us today for a workshop and tasked the first years with finding a discarded item which they could up cycle into a characterful animal.

They returned with a wide array of found items to transform into original artworks and then return to the original location, photograph and leave behind, to be found and possibly kept by a passer by. Inspired by artworks shown by My Dog Sighs the students were introduced to the concept behind Free Art Friday, a global community of artists creating work which is returned and left for any member of the public to take home and enjoy.

The weeks so far spent studying the characteristics of the animals is becoming more apparent in the pieces the students produced.

Drawing in the air

Researching into animals according to Shakespeare is yielding some fascinating results; you should never come between a dragon and its wrath, rats would desert the vessel described in The Tempest and the goat is coming across very cheekily. The next stage for the students is to vigorously research and develop ideas to convey some of these results, how can wrath, desertion and cheekiness be conveyed with a drawing, a sculpture, an animation or a photograph?

This workshop involved 'drawing' with wire of varying thicknesses (and it is easier said than done) to encourage the students to explore spacial and gestural properties they could employ in their explorations with conveying their animal and the specific focus they are working towards

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SHAKESPEARE'S Animals - the first workshop

Welcome back all our first years after what was hopefully a lovely (and well earned) Christmas break. Today we started the new project 'Shakespeare's Animals' (The Illustrated Menagerie's focus this year) with a warm up workshop involving charades, a Mexican wave, some 'exquisite corpses' and label line work. 

Welcome to the Shakespearean Menagerie - Shakespeare's Animals

Today the Illustrated Menagerie was interviewed by Hannah Sperring, Creative writing student at the University of Portsmouth, who's now penned an exciting piece about our involvement in the upcoming festival in Portsmouth celebrating all things Shakespeare; Much Ado about Portsmouth. We have a number of things in the pipeline for exploring animals this year with this new focus of how Shakespeare himself employed their characteristics to describe characters in his plays.

Our remit ordinarily involves illustrating animals which are actually living and breathing, but this year we will embrace the mythical and legendary creatures also to try to capture some of the range of the creatures which featured in plays and sonnets penned four hundred (plus) years ago.

We are also lucky enough to have been offered a very exciting opportunity to exhibit of some of the work as a group student show, in the Freda Swain room at Portsmouth Guildhall.

Exhibition Dates: 12 March - 7 June 2016 

Much Ado!

The Illustrated Menagerie is now dipping its toes into the writings of Shakespeare for inspiration to work with, as part of the upcoming Much Ado About Portsmouth Festival (see maap.port.ac.uk for more details)

Portsmouth-based festival events marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. The festival will run from the 18th to the 23rd April 2016 (culminating on the day of Shakespeare's death).

Kerry Thompson- Rats

For my Methodology project my chosen animal was a rat. I chose a Rat as I found a rat is a well-known species commonly found around the world and imbedded within different cultures. Often thought of in a negative way, which I felt left room for a wide variety for visual interpretation. For my final piece I focused around my key five words I chose to describe my animal, I created a picture book with photography from local locations to best match each word and simulate a sense of journey throughout the book.

                                                                     My Final Piece

                                                                   Stop Motion animation