Nightcliff Seabreeze Festival

On May 10th and 11th, Nightcliff put on it's annual Seabreeze Festival. The festival consists of local artists, businesses, singers, dancers, and more all coming together and sharing their talents with the people of Darwin. It's a really amazing event and I really enjoyed being there. My Visual Arts teacher created a project for this event and our whole morning session of the class was basically created around this project.

I mentioned this project a little bit in a previous post, but basically we had to go down to Nightcliff to take pictures with 10 instructions in mind: near view, distant view, stare, scan, what's at your feet, texture, stylistic variation, view from another angle, sky detail, and text. When we had the ten pictures that we wanted to use, we were supposed to edit them how we wanted, and then place them in a template our teacher had created for us for them to be printed onto vinyl in a triangle shape. The whole project took forever, and I spent about ten hours sewing my bunting onto the rope. My fingers were still sore a whole week after I had finished it! However, it was seriously so rewarding. Finally, on the 10th of May, we headed out to Nightcliff to set up our bunting! It was so amazing getting to showcase my work like that. The whole process took about ten to twenty minutes and then we got some pictures and headed back home!

The next evening, we went back down to Nightcliff to check out the festival and to take down our bunting so we could take them home with us. There were so many different things to see and so much art! There was a sandcastle contest, art everywhere, a ton of different booths from local businesses, a dj, a ton of bands, and many many dancers. It was seriously so cool getting to see so many diverse groups of people sharing their talents with the community. I'm still in awe that I had the opportunity to be a part of this incredible festival. I am so so grateful that I had this amazing opportunity and I hope that this is something that sticks with me.

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My reflection on the project for my class journal:

My main focus for this project was the effect of people on the environment. Due to this, I wanted to place my bunting on the fence with the pier visible behind it. I also really liked the place that I chose because the majority of the spots I took photos of were visible from there. I thought that this would be nice because it would be like the images were magnifying areas that viewers were seeing in the distance and it sort of ties the whole shoreline together. I chose to put my photos in the order that I took them in. I did this mainly because I felt that doing this told a story more than the other combinations that I had tried and it also had more of a cohesive feel to it. I originally was just putting my photos in a random order to see how it looked and then I would reorder them one by one based on how I felt with the placement of each image. However, I wasn't much of a fan of the orders that I ended up with and they just felt really disjointed. I then tried making up a story about my pictures and put them in different orders based off of that to create visually the story that I had in my head. This still felt really disjointed and it just wasn't very aesthetically pleasing. I started pulling images out and grouping them together based on the feel of each one and tried to order them that way but there wasn't enough flow between the images and I tried even pulling one from each group I had made and made a pattern out of them, but still I got the same result. So, I put them in the order I took them and this order had all of the things that the other arrangements were missing and I could see the story in there. I also thought that it was cool that the viewer could walk along the images and feel like they were walking along the foreshore.