Rock Challenge 2012

The Global Rock Challenge has been the best experience of my life.

I have taught myself so much and learnt about what I really want. No matter how hard I worked in life I felt I was always that tiny bit disappointed. There was something about the Rock Challenge that made me want to do well. It made me want to succeed. When I was 13 years old I participated in the Rock Challenge as a performer and year by year I fell more and more in love with the idea of performance.

Something that we would never get anywhere near enough recognition for was the amount of hard work that goes into being a team leader. The 6^th form committee would always put their heart and soul into the Rock Challenge, persistent to have as little help from the teachers as possible, which has been truly inspirational. We would work so hard as a team and often get disappointed for not getting placed in the top 3. However, we came back fighting, willing to work harder every year!

Year after year we would get picked on and made fun of by other kids in school because of how “rubbish Carisbrooke’s Global Rock was”. I’m going to be honest; this was a horrible thing to have said to you, no matter how jokey it was.

After experiencing being a team leader last year I realised how much work goes into making a production like this. Deciding on a theme, soundtrack, choreography, teaching, costume, set, hair, makeup, lighting and fundraising is just the start of what we do as a 6^th form committee! On top of all this, try to make it fun for the performers and backstage helpers taking part. The fact that we do this around our school studies out of our own free will speaks for itself about how much this means to us.

We first got our top 3 placement in 2010 but yet somehow I still wasn’t satisfied. I felt like people still didn’t truly recognise, understood or care about how good we were at what we did! Therefore, being a team leader the following year encouraged me to work exceedingly hard to the point that it was exhausting and stressful. It was so important to me to give our school a good name.

This year I have been involved with costume and makeup which, again, has taught me so much about how to work with a client: not easy! I thought I would miss being a performer on stage this year but I felt I enjoyed it more to watch the rest of the team on stage dancing with all their heart and soul.

This evening has been one of the most emotional evenings of my life when Carisbrooke College was awarded 1^st place along with best makeup, choreography and set! I felt like after all these years our hard work had finally paid off and I was completely overwhelmed with happiness. Every group of team leaders for Carisbrooke has taught us so much and we have learnt so much off each other’s mistakes, so much so that we have managed to exceed beyond our expectations which is a feeling that I really cannot describe.

Overall, taking part in the Global Rock Challenge for 6 years has been an overwhelming experience of ups and downs but ending on a natural high: something you really cannot get from drugs or alcohol, which I believe is the intention of this project. Next year I intend to study a degree in costume for performance, completely inspired by the Rock Challenge. I feel like I am now capable of anything and it really proves that if you’re passionate about something you can achieve the unimaginable.

Thank you so much Rock Challenge for the opportunity. It will be an experience that I will truly never forget.

A sense of place photoshoot

Curtosy of my model, Laura Bourne and blanket holder Eve Catling!

A sense of place - final piece

A sense of place continued

For this project I have decided to design a costume for the patients in the mental hospital from the story 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest' by Ken Kesey. From my primary research I let the shape and structure of a fence inspire me as well as what it represents.

A fence can represent feeling trapped or controlled by something or someone. Or it can represent protection and security which is symbolic as quite motherly and loving. The idea of something being unpleasant close up but from a distance be quite soft relates to clusters of pins. Pins are classified as 'dangerous' and look almost evil close up. However, when put in clusters and looked at from a distance they look soft, fluffy and very beautiful. I decided to use this idea in the costume design combined with the fence idea.

Photo collage -
using pins to show how they look elegantly beautiful in clusters as opposed to looking sharp and unpleasant

Knitwear being used to represent the idea of a fence

A sense of place

For this project I was given a location and through primary research such as photography, drawing and textile work I recorded the location. The idea of this research was to investigate new and innovative shape, pattern, texture and colour combination.

From this research I took an interest in the amount of fences around. I loved the shapes they created when looking at them from different perspectives. But more importantly I was interested in what they symbolised. On one hand, one might look at them as symbolising feeling trapped and controlled as they are a way of keeping something in like animals. On the other hand they could symbolise security and protection which represents motherly behaviour.

I took this analysis and related it to the story 'One Flew over the Cuckoo Nest' by Ken Kesey. The link between the patient's feelings and the fence analysis are quite similar so I decided to design a uniform that the mental patients would wear in the hospital inspired by fences.

Life drawing

1 minute poses

2 minute poses