Park Hill Art School

During May a group of first year fine art, creative art practice and architecture students from Sheffield Hallam undertook a residency at The Scottish Queen, an old pub and now a gallery space, at Park Hill, Sheffiled. 

We were left with this space to work with, in the partially refurbished Park Hill flats, one of the most iconic pieces of architecture in the area, for just over a week before our opening night. 

I wanted my work to relate to the area in some way, and so I began by exploring the flats with my camera. 

I loved the bright colours of some of the areas in constrast with the grey palette of the majority of the area. Certain parts of the older building are bright such as this, and this is something that has been brought into the refurbished flats, and that I wanted to bring into my work. 

 I also loved the layers of geometric shapes, and the complex grids and lines within the architecture. 

There was something about the statement "everything of value  has been removed from this property" printed on the doors on a lot of the empty flats. Almost the idea that the flat wasn't of any value itself. 

I started working with my small sculptures from my first year degree work, spray painting these bright colours, inspired by the colour within Park Hill. I loved the spray paint left on the newspaper I had used to spray these on and wanted to use these within my work too. 

I wanted to recreated the "everything of value has been removed from this property", using blue spray paint on a cupboard door. I intended to use this as a background for a painting, however once I removed the masking tape I liked it just as it was. 

Using the same technique as above I created the foreground from the photograph below using silver and blue spray paint. 

 I then used ink and white acrylic paint to create the background, layering and extrending the lines within the photograph. 

Leading on from the idea of using the backgrounds from spray painting, I used this plastic sheet I had previously used to spray paint a larger sculpture for another piece. I stuck this up in the window of the space, and again using ink and white acrylic, created a piece inspired by the architecture I could directly see. 

 I laid this on the floor, using this to create almost as sculptural landscape from my small spray painted pieces.