Amber Toman

I have chosen to look at rats and how they are misunderstood in our society but are looked at differently around the world. I’ve chosen to look at zines, especially punk zines for my sequential illustration final piece. My idea is to create a parody of a Punk Zine but to be replaced with my chosen animal of rats, using Anthropomorphism to portray a zine. I’ve found new ways such as digital practice to create new and improved artwork.

Rat - Jakub Marjanski

I decided to follow the Rat for the project, the reason I took the rat is because the idea of an animal that represents pestilence fascinated me. I instantly jumped to looking at the disgusting side of rats and found that the animal is actually quite clean. I had to look quite hard to find pictures of sewer rats and diseased ones on the streets of New York city. Eventually I collected a range of images that I sketched out.

With that I went on to look up the pestilence part of this project. I looked at depictions of gods and concepts such as the 4 riders of the apocalypse. In my search I found the black death and that it came in 3 different versions that plagued different parts of the world. I decided to make that my main theme.

With that discovery I decided that I should depict the disease moving from one place to the other like it did. In a tutorial I was informed of concertina books, their long length were perfect for the subject.

Final Piece

The final piece was made with 3 cellulose thinner prints of works I have done in my book, each representing the location where black death happened. The in-between parts are transitions made with a Graphite pencil (I also went over the prints with it to make them darker and feel like an old painting). The band around the book was made with a map to add to the travel aspect and the actual book is made with Fabriano paper. It's missing text that was meant to accompany the images but I didn't have enough time to add them to the piece.

The first image represents the Byzantine empire, second Europe and last China.

Rats by AmberAtlantis

For my 'Shakespeare's animals' project I decided to focus upon the rat, as it's my favourite animal and they posses some interesting superstitious qualities, as well as similarities to the human body which are used for scientific study.

After conducting broad research into the animal such as their anatomy, behaviour, habitat and diet etc, I visited a large pet store and started producing lots of direct observational sketches. This is what helped me most in understanding their movement and behaviours. I also reviewed the texts in which rats are mentioned in Shakespeare's works, and I decided to centre my ideas around a scene in 'Tempest' where Prospero describes a boat that he fled to Italy on. This scene evolves around the superstition that rats leaving a ship in port indicates that the vessel will encounter misfortune at sea such as sinking.

With this idea in mind, I experimented with collage and 3D techniques which i could possibly use to illustrate the ship superstition, including wire sculptures wrapped in twine and wallpaper collages as shown above.

Eventually I settled for using paper mache to create the basic structure of the rat, and then I glued card triangles over this to create the fur. For my final piece I produced 2 rats; the card triangles on one were covered in ripped magazine, and the other was using a watercolour + salt technique to look like rust. Both of these symbolise neglect. 

I did some final research in rat euphemisms, where i came across the term 'rat king'. This is where rats live in an extremely cramped space, so eventually their tails become knotted together. I decided to join the tails of my two sculptures, but I did so by researching the types of knots used in sailing and made the tails out of rope to connote the boat superstition. I made the remaining features out of clay, and set the sculptures on a piece of driftwood which I found at the beach. My intention with this was to convey a narrative of the plank being a stray part of a recently sunken ship, and the rats had to escape together due to being connected at the tail. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this project and I look forward to seeing my work displayed in the Shakespeare's animals exhibition at Portsmouth Guildhall! Feel free to check out these links for some of my other art and photography work!

www.facebook.com/amberatlantis

www.youtube.com/AmberAtlantis

www.amberatlantis.blogspot.co.uk