ART TRIP

Pinhole Photography with Vivien Rickman-Poole

Our picture with Vivien herself.

Us in the classroom making our pinhole camera:)

For our CAS day out we went to Bodelwyddan Castle to see and learn more about Francesca Woodman's art work. She took many photographs of herself in black and white for the viewer to interpret. Her photographs have a kind of mystery to it and it may even hold the key to the reason of her suicide when she was only 22. Vivien was the artist that we met when we got there. An interesting fact about her is that she goes swimming everyday in rivers, lakes, seas but never in a swimming pool; even in the winter! She taught us how to make a pinhole camera using a coca cola can interestingly enough. All we had to do was poke a pin on the side of the can, make a shutter and lid with duck tape and put in photo paper. With the picture taking, we went around the castle and took pictures of the scenery or ourselves; we could be as creative as we wanted. The pinhole camera had to placed still and the shutter taken off for a maximum of 4 seconds, any longer and the photo paper would have had too much exposure and turned completely black. Also to prevent it from getting too much exposure it was recommended that we didn't face our pinhole camera at the sun. I think it was great to experience things like this because it lets you see the world in a different perspective, you aren't just trapped to belive in one thing and I think that's what's great about art, is that it's open to interpretations and you can express things that couldn't be expressed through words. This trip has also let me be creative and a sort of outlet from work. A balance is definitely required for a healthy life or else we might stumble into a deep depression and isolate oursleves from the world. We can only make assumptions as to why Francesca Woodman took her own life at such a young age but she would have had been unduring a hell for her to make that decision.

Our break spent at the swings!

One of my pictures.