Reflective Report- Persons of Note

Persons of Note

Delia Derbyhire

Starting this project became quite challenging to me as a sequence of bad stuff in my personal life happened all at once. Therefore i only truly began to start the project two weeks after the brief had been set- and i still hadn't even picked an influential person to research. A lot of my research was done by listening to radio broadcasts and watching old BBC videos on Delia Derbyshire on youtube. this way, i could generate visual ideas while researching, and i formed the basis of my idea this way.

i discovered that Derbyshire formed her work by handling real cut tape and creating the sounds herself by using found or household objects, like banging a bucket or lampshade and speeding up or slowing down the sound to make it seem other-worldly- ground-breaking for the 1960's. the fact that she was constantly surrounded by bottles of wine that she created music out of and also drank obsessively from became a recurring theme in my work- i played with the shape of wine and how it influenced her work in more than one way. 

I rounded the project up by making my final piece represent all the significant household objects in her life- the wine bottles, the bran-flake boxes that her meticulous work was all crammed into and left undiscovered as a large a2 poster, and a tiny lampshade and bucket and radio- collaged onto stamps. the household objects and hand-made final designs reflect her hand-made work and her household fame (despite getting no credit) - the doctor who theme tune. 

i feel like although i kept it simple and it was definitely a shorter project than was hoped for, it would have been overwhelming to go into details of her musical talent or explore electronic sound in much more depth- i feel like the project needed to be kept simple and gentle both to reflect the subject matter and to give myself a little bit of slack. i am however, very pleased with the outcomes of the project and unusually satisfied with my own work, especially considering the rough few weeks i was having.

Roy xx