Curriculum Vitae

Lois Gowland

Lois_Gowland@hotmail.com | loisgowland.blogspot.co.uk

EDUCATION:

Manchester Metropolitan University                                                             September 2011- June 2014

BA(Hons) Textiles In Practice

Newcastle College                                                                                                 August 2010- May 2011

Foundation Diploma in Art and Design

• Grade: Pass

Heaton Manor School and Post-16                                                                 September 2003-June 2010

A-Levels: English Literature (C), English Language (C), Textiles (C), Geography (D a AS)

GSCE: 2 As, 4 Bs, 4 Cs

WORK EXPERIENCE:

Hilton Hotels & Resorts                                                                                            October 2009-Present

Conferencing & Events (C&E) Banqueting Team Leader

• Responsible of teams of up to 6 people ensuring efficient and correct service of customers during busy events of up to 500 people.
• Often required to work with the bar team.
• Have developed time-keeping, communication, problem-solving and leadership skills during my time here.

Oxfam GB                                                                                                                  June 2008- June 2010

Shop Volunteer

• Responsibilities including creating shop window displays, shelving and wall displays.
• Sorting of clothes and items to sell, or to donate to WasteSaver.
• Managed the stock of the New Products Range.
• Trusted to work without supervision on many shifts.
• Helped with Oxfam’s Re-Make/Re-Model project for Newcastle’s Green Festival in June 2010, creating garments out of old clothes as well as modeling for the event.

SKILLS:

IT/CAD Skills: I have experience with using Photoshop in many projects, to create prints and present my work. I enjoy doing so and will continue to develop these skills.

Pattern-Cutting and Fashion: Since GCSE my Textiles work has always been Fashion-based. During my time at Heaton Manor we were taught how to use existing patterns, as well as how to customise and create bespoke pieces. I feel this is a good skill to have and use it when an opportunity arises.

Knitting: I am enjoying developing my hand and machine knitting, I would like to be able to create knitted garments soon.

Drawing and Painting: I use various techniques and materials to draw with, to give depth to my sketchbooks and larger pieces. Recently I have started to enjoy painting with Gouache paints, which help me to add colour to my work. With a lot of my drawings, I take them to Photoshop and work with them digitally.

Presentation: I believe two strengths of mine are visual and verbal presentations, which I have developed since A-Level.

Pattern-making with Maps: Progression with colour and repeats

Following a productive printing session, I used the facilities on campus to photocopy four of the prints that were a reasonable size, on to tracing paper. Because I don't think I have the facilities to apply my prints to fabric, I hope I can create some interesting ideas using tracing paper, here are the designs as more repeat patterns:

On the outline maps (last two) I experimented with colour, although it took a long time. I will photocopy them in colour and proceed to work with these on a mannequin and photoshop.

Pattern-making with Maps:

Following a tutorial this morning in which we realised how little time we have left, I got straight in to the flow of Monday Morning work and decided to apply the pattern I did last on to iron-on transfer paper. Although easy to apply to the paper itself, it was NOT easy to apply to the fabric, in fact, it didn't work at all, except the accidentally-photocopied binding of my sketchbook:

I decided I didn't want to waste the fabric, so I used a fine-liner on it and created the maps myself, using the whole length to create a path of maps:

I'm really happy with this, although it didn't go to plan, I think I made the best out of a bad situation, since the fabric with be used as part of an installation, it doesn't have to be created in a practical manner.

I then carried on using the same map to photocopy, fill in, and create more patterns:

I am pleased with all of these patterns, and hope to print on to tracing paper, to create more samples.

Working with Maps:

In addition to re-creating the maps of Hulme and the city centre of Manchester, I decided to work with the maps a little more, I could already see patterns in the maps, so used this map of a very small part of Hulme:

.. and repeated it randomly and came up with this:

I wanted to place the map so it appeared to start off somewhere on quite a large scale, and then spread over to another part of the page. I then photocopied it several times and reduced the size of it, creating a pattern:

I really liked this idea and decided I would work with it some more.

Further Sketchbook Work:

After a confused Easter holidays, I found our first tutorial back quite inspiring. Due to a suggestion at the beginning of the project from Alex Russell, I decided to look at maps of different parts of Manchester, whilst others in the group looked at the spread of germs and disease which came from the over crowding of Manchester during the Industrial Revolution.
First I looked at the more Industrial areas of Manchester, around the City Centre:

I then did a series of drawings from these maps, including blind drawings, continuous line drawings and negative drawings:

I decided to look at an area which has always been residential, to show the idea of over crowding better:
HULME:

I continued my idea from earlier of using different techniques, however I layered drawings, and also used colour differently, whilst creating larger scale versions to imagine them as patterns:

I then created A2 versions of the maps, using home-made paint brushes (attached to a 50cm pole), ink and cut outs:

Initial sketchbook work:

I took the repetition ideas out of my visual research and explored them whilst drawing the machines from the industrial revolution. I'm quite interested in researching the theme of repetition, in different aspects of the revolution..

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Visual research from the Museum of Science and Industry:

I took photographs of the machinery, which had been demonstrated to us previously. The demonstration was very visual, allowing the audience to imagine what it would have been like for the men and women working in the factories. 

I focused alot of my attention on the repetition of the machines, including the noises, actions and visuals. 

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