Katie Nolan

Throughout this project i have been trying to make functional items using paper pulp that also look like a desirable object. It was a bumpy start with all my samples falling to pieces and therefor not very functional. At this final stage in the project i feel like i have overcome a lot of challenges and have finally achieved something that is durable, functional and aesthetically pleasing. Although i would have liked to be further on in this project by this stage, I didn't anticipate how tricky it would be to find a technique and 'recipe' that would really work. Below is my final sample for PULP, a vase slip made with recycled printer paper, hand painted and held together by a simple running stitch. The video below demonstrates how the slip works. This is something I really want to continue developing in unit X, making more shapes to cover different objects such as wine bottles, plastic water bottles etc. to make what would be rubbish into something decorative ...

SOPHIES SAVES THE PLANET This is Sophie, she just turned 7 and she lives on Planet earth, probably where you live too! Sophie grew up in the on a farm in the Yorkshire countryside and lived with her mum, dad, sister and kitten Oscar. They grew their own vegetables, got all of their food at the local shops and spent their days playing in the nearby fields when not at school. Their kitten Oscar even used to make friends with the sheep! They loved living there, but when Sophie was 6 her mum got a job in London! How exciting, she thought! She couldn’t wait to tell all of her friends at school about the move and within a few weeks they were off. They promised to send letters back and forth and promised she would come back and visit all the time As they approached London Sophie began to worry, she noticed that there weren’t many fields, the shops were all much bigger and there were more people than she’d ever seen in her life! The next day Sophie and her mum...

This drawing project began as a way for me to return to a more illustrative style of drawing that i used to really enjoy and in the last couple of years have stopped doing. I feel very strongly about issues surrounding the environment and wanted to find out more about sustainability, over consumption and what we can do to help. My research started by looking at the 10 most frequently littered items, the top non surprisingly being cigarette butts. cigarettes are full of toxins that seep into waterways, and the filters are made of plastic and can take up to 80 years to decompose. The second most littered product, again not surprisingly is plastic water bottles... then plastic shopping bags etc. I quickly got bored of drawing various types of rubbish and decided that it would be more useful, in terms of informing people, to make something like a zine or an informative booklet. I started doing some illustrations that focused on exces...

Technique update Previously, making the paper was a tricky process in terms of either using a small frame and having to piece pieces together or using fabric not in a frame and trying to pick it up without moving the pulp around, which made for fragile edges so I went to the canvas stretching workshop and built an A3 paper making frame using Pine and a small meshed fabric. The frame sits over my sink at home and makes it much easier to form larger pieces of paper and simultaneously creates a place to dry the paper allowing it to properly drain.

Current contextual research for PULP development i ro se - Leather folded purse Bookhou fold and sew paper wallet Inspired by the artists above, I had a go at using my paper to make some functional products, a card holder and a wallet. The paper can be fairly easily manipulated by folding but it eventually tears and cracks. I also wanted to attach the pieces together with hand embroidery but each needle hole created a large tear so i made these tests using glue/bulldog clips. The paper almost needs a piece of support fabric on the folds and seams but ideally I want them to be 100% paper. I noticed that the weaker points of the paper were where i joined smaller pieces up or the edges so i made a large paper making frame in the canvas stretching workshop out of pine and mesh. This should hopefully eliminate the above problems. I also want to replicate the liquid in a jar of pickled beetroots, as previously this made my fabric very bendy, jus...

Following the end of the STAC x Virgin project, as a group we decided to continue to develop the project as we really liked some of the ideas we had come up with and wanted to push them further and reinvent the project to be something more suited to our way of working. STAC wanted a muted wall installation, but I love colour, 3D work and interesting shape so this felt like a perfect opportunity to reimagine this project. Like any new project, I began with drawing. I started by referring back to the images I took in and around the Castlefield area and drew my attention slightly away from the shapes we had focused on earlier in the project and tried to discoverer something different in these images that i had not paid attention to before and since starting to work in a more illustrative drawing style in my Drawing project I found more inspiration in the photographs I took that I had done previously. Following drawing, we started sampling making fun playful shapes using...

STAC architects were commissioned by Virgin Atlantic to design the new Clubhouse Lounge in Manchester Airport. They wanted a textile wall to be produced and came to MMU for those designs with the over arching theme being Manchester. Daisy, Chloe and I decided to work collaboratively on this project as we work in similar ways and enjoy working with similar materials and colours. We began our research by walking through Manchester paying attention to things that create the blueprints of the city. We were amazed by the amount of viaducts that still exist in the city, especially in the castle fields area. We started photographing the arches and drawing from those images. I began by thinking about the arches as a repeat pattern, using hand drawn images and photoshopping a pattern. I began drawing more freely from the photographs, enabling me to discover shapes present in the photos. The designers wanted a a fairly muted design so i gradually simplifie...