Jade Davies

London Alternative Fashion Week - I'M IN!

2012-01-21T00:51:00.001Z

My styling & creative direction (and consequently my blogging duties) have had to be put on hold temporarily while I create my collection for London Alternative Fashion Week!

Me being me, I've dipped my fingers in yet another pie and have finally been able to work on my passion for unusual masks/'Facewear'. I've had an overriding obsession with masks for the last couple of years since I began researching for my 'Emotionalisation' work, particularly inspired by the artist Gillian Wearing's work with masks. Wearing created very moving films of normal people sharing their deepest, darkest secrets - able to purely because they were wearing masks. Now most wouldn't call the masks she used 'pretty', but it was the psychology behind this work that really struck a chord with me. Having always been interested in how the mind controls the body & vice-versa, I became hooked on the use of masks to hide, adorn and accentuate the face, by working with the natural beauty & contours of the face.

Metal was the material that I decided would work best for me, as the possibilities seem almost endless. However I'm not limiting myself to this medium, so I'm also exploring various other materials. In need of metal work skills, I undertook jewellery making lessons at the brilliant London Jewellery School, learning to work with silver from some really inspiring & experienced jewellery designers/creators - Zoe Harding & Michael Milloy.

Gemma Landing, a fashion designer friend then approached me a few months later with the proposal to create a combined collection to enter to London Alternative Fashion Week. I immediately agreed and so we began our weekly meetings to get our collection together. I think even Gemma and I are surprised how well we work together - both really hard workers, highly ambitious and very creative, we work together to make such a strong team. We were (and still are!) so excited when we found out just before Christmas '11 that we'd got into AFW 2012...and so the work to create the collection 'for real' has begun!

Combining high-fashion facewear & large statement haute-couture jewellery for the body, with stunning feminine 'Roman goddesss-like' garments - all with a little fetish edge to them, we're both so excited to show our first collection to London.

My website's still being developed, but here's the holding page: http://www.jdfacewear.com

Our collection 'Alexandria' will be on the catwalk in April 2012 in London. YES!!

More news soon & a belated happy new year to everyone! x

Tassles, masks, big hair, lingerie & hair extensions! New images!

2011-08-02T13:36:00.001+01:00

Images from latest fashion shoot, with a fantastic team. Lewis Pallett has recently won 'Hair extension specialist of the year' with Professional Hairdressing Magazine 2011, so it was great to have him on board creating amazing hair styles for us - particularly the long hair extensions in the images inspired by Roberto Cavalli's SS11 shows.

(Above) Necklace & bracelet by Natalia Shugaeva

I'm really into this Amazonian, bohemian theme that we've seen on some SS11 catwalks, so it was great to recreate it in my own way, with inspiring input from the rest of the creative team.

We all wanted to get different, but similar things from the photoshoot, so we covered a variety of looks. John (photographer) was keen to add some lingerie shots to his portfolio, which Jessica suited perfectly:

John created yet another lovely lighting style for these sensual but not outright 'sex' shots.

Another little project of mine is working with metal, in particular making masks...so I was keen to see how my first mask would look photographed:

Mask by Jade Davies

Lastly, some catalogue/basic editorial shots:

Thought of the day: The problem with styling shoots is that you often find yourself keeping some of the wardrobe for your personal wardrobe...

Feedback always appreciated - hope you enjoy! J x

Photographer: John Spence

Art Director & Stylist: Jade Davies

Hair Stylist: Lewis Pallett

MUA: Dave Waterman

Model: Jessica Munro

Studio: The Pub Studio, London

All images © John Spence

Imogen Heap 'The Making of Lifeline' video with me in it!

2011-06-23T12:13:00.002+01:00

Here's the 'The Making of Lifeline' Video, which follows how musician Imogen Heap made her latest song, including the making of the Lifeline music video. Heap's concept of creating a song made from sounds & words that her fans sent in, along with images for the video, has created not only an incredibly beautiful song, but also a highly alternative approach to music making.

You can see me briefly in the video where I'm body painting Imogen. I pop up at 9mins43secs & 9mins46secs! Oh the fame...! :)

If you'd like to read all about my experience of working on the music video, see my post ; and watch the music video for Lifeline here.

Imogen Heap - The Making of Lifeline from Imogen Heap on Vimeo.

Sneaky peaks from latest shoot - Tassles, masks, big hair, lingerie & hair extensions!

2011-06-21T19:41:00.000+01:00

Few shots from the iphone - proper shots up on website asap! Had a great shoot on Sunday with a fabulous team - John Spence (photographer), Lewis Pallett (hair stylist), Jessica Munro (model), Dave Waterman (mua), and of course me styling & AD-ing! I also made the mask that's in one of the shots. Amazing hair by Lewis, who has just been named 'hair extension specialist of the year' with Professional Hairdressing Magazine 2011.

'The Art of Pole Dancing' : Shoot with World Champ Elena Gibson

2011-06-21T18:58:00.001+01:00

Recently I did a shoot with world champion pole dancer Elena Gibson, where we pushed the boundaries of an art that carries many negative connotations. The shoot is a study of the beauty, movement and grace of the art of pole dancing and aerial hoop. This form of dance and acrobatics has never been photographed with such attention to detail or technical processes. All images were shot in one exposure, with only minor retouching work completed.
See more images from this shoot on my website.

Photographer: John Spence

Art Director & Stylist: Jade Davies

Model/Dancer: Elena Gibson, founder of Pole Dancing School
All images © John Spence

Fashion Editorial 'Forgotten Innocence'

2011-04-20T17:54:00.004+01:00

New work for Spring/Summer '11:

Photographer: John Spence

Art Director & Stylist (& Concept): Jade Davies

MUA & Hair Stylist: Sarah Abbott

Model: Kamila

Same.As Talk - Video

2011-04-20T17:18:00.005+01:00

Here goes sharing another embarrassing video of me doing a talk... As you might have read in an earlier post, I was invited by 'Same.As' to do a talk in London (to over 100 people) on the subject of visualisation. If you'd like to read the full content of my talk, including the bits that I left out as I nervously hacked my way through it, you'll find it here.

SameAs Meetup - Visualisation - Jade Davies from Steven Allen on Vimeo.

Thanks very much to Steven Allen for making this video.

A nice little extra - 'Information Today, Europe' includes me in an article written about the event, entitled 'Adventures in Data Visualisation' by Val Skelton. Read the whole article here; or the exert about my work below:

"Jade Davies is a graphic and visual designer who is interested in emotional responses to visual representation. Her project, Emotionalisation, involved her ‘using her own emotions as a data source’ and representing this data as pins on a model’s face to bring the data to life. The pins map Jade’s emotions on a difficult day in her final year at university. The image is a striking representation of ‘fuzzy data’."

Sold!

2011-04-14T15:09:00.002+01:00

The Succeed Foundation, a new & fast-growing charity who help people with eating disorders, recently asked me to donate some pieces of my work for their fantastic launch party at The (Shakespeare) Globe Theatre in London on the evening of April 1st 2011.

I donated two signed limited edition large prints to their silent auction & attended the gala that night. Unfortunately the piece 'Self-Image Visualisation' didn't sell, but the 'Emotionalisation' piece sold for £600! It was a bit of a gamble putting these pieces into the auction, as I've never tried to sell any of my work before, but I'm still really happy with the outcome. It was great to be involved in such a great cause & hopefully gain some more exposure for my work. Strange to think that my artwork is hanging in someone's home!

The launch party was a fabulous night of amazing surroundings; good wine; great food; interesting company, with a few celebs hosting the event, as well as a great mixture of people around the tables; and of course, amazing art! Not to mention the casino tables that I struggled to drag myself away from - do I sense a gambling addiction lurking in the midst of my psyche? We'll leave that as a rhetorical question.

Lifeline by Imogen Heap

2011-04-03T18:28:00.002+01:00

The music video that John Spence & I helped to create at The Pub Studio is now online. - See my post below talking about the making of this video! So without further ado, check out this amazing video for Imogen Heap's incredible new song Lifeline:

Imogen Heap - meeting & working with her on new music video

2011-03-29T20:39:00.013+01:00

Imogen Heap came to the studio last week to film the video for her new song 'Lifeline'. I was exceptionally lucky to not only meet my favourite musician, but also work creatively with her & her team, including body painting her.

It all came about after I watched one of Imogen's live video blogs recently and heard how she wanted a wooden floor in her new video, so I emailed her & suggested the studio that my partner (John Spence) runs - 'The Pub Studio'. Consequently, she decided to shoot the video at the studio, and also came across John & I's work - asking us to be involved creatively. Imogen also decided she wanted to be body painted for the video after seeing John's personal project 'Paint It Black'.

On the day of filming, I painted Imogen's whole body white, which proved to be a little tricky with this colour having a reputation for being the worst colour to apply. We persevered though & Imogen was eventually transformed into a much paler version of herself! Images that fans had sent to her were then projected onto her newly white back while the camera panned around her body, where she sat surrounded by interchanging floors of leaves, grass, metal, sheepskin & of course- wood. John was predominantly in charge of lighting the shoot & did a fantastic job.

Imogen was meant to have her whole body painted black as well, but we ran out of time. We did manage to paint her face & neck black though, but this meant doing it while she blogged live as she had a blog date with her fans! So if you'd like to see me painting Imogen black while she talks live about the progress of the video & song, watch this video (there will be about 30secs of ads at the beginning):

Tom Kelly (director, camera man, editor of video) did a few quick takes of her singing Lifeline while she was painted black, and John did a quick photo shoot later too.

Imogen & I, after white paint & before black!

Party at Imogen's, Mon 28th March 2011 -
Last night after I'd finished my Same.As talk in central London, we rushed to the outskirts to attend Imogen Heap's party at her beautiful house. Greeted with delicious food, ample drink & friendly faces, we had a great time. Imogen was extremely trusting inviting so many people to her house, including many fans who had contributed a sound or image to Lifeline; and showed us round her recording studio where she played us the final version of this incredible new song. We were also invited to see the first showing of the video that John & I had hosted the filming of & assisted on. The video blew us away, with Tom doing a fantastic job of filming & editing it.

The video should be up tomorrow, as well as a making-of film soon too. [The video is now available to watch here.]

www.imogenheap.com

What a night & what a couple of weeks this is turning out to be...

'Same.As' Talk - Mon 28th March 2011 - London

2011-03-29T18:57:00.004+01:00

Last night I did a talk for Same.As, who bring scientists, technology geeks, artists & more together to discuss a variety of interesting topics. Same.As aim to reveal the threads that stitch these diverse individuals together. The theme of last night's talks was 'visualisation', so I was asked to talk about the work I've done around this subject - my personal project 'Emotionalisation'. It was great to be asked to speak, but was somewhat nerve-wracking talking to over 100 people crammed into every inch of a tiny pub room, with a lot of them being rather intelligent scientists! Here's the written version of my talk (this time including the bits that I left out due to extreme nerves):

Hi, I'm Jade Davies and I'm a London-based freelance creative – creative being a simple title for an arty jack-of-all-trades, though I currently specialise in art direction for photo shoots ranging from conceptual fine art to editorial.

I'm going to talk to you about this data visualisation I did last year, where I used my personal emotions as the data source & represented this data in an unusual, slightly sadistic way.

The human face constantly conveys emotional information through facial expressions, providing an often unconscious window into the vast array of human emotions. Consequently, personal emotional data that I collected over pre-determined time slots throughout one day is visualised using the human face as the canvas to display the data. Due to the unpredictable and unquantifiable nature of human emotion, the pins are plotted in accordance with a sense of where the emotion was felt most in relation to the face; and they are not restricted by a set number of points. Additionally, colour identifies the different core emotions and the depth at which the pins enter the skin describes the intensity of the emotion.

If we take a look at the key, you will see that I categorised each emotion I felt into one of the six core emotions, each one represented by a separate colour – anger/red, joy/orange, love/yellow, surprise/green, sadness/blue and fear/purple. There are three distinct depths at which the pins pierce the skin – mild, moderate & severe. Mild being the pins that only penetrate the surface of the skin, while severe are deep in the flesh. The placing of the pins was scientifically the most random element of this subjective visualisation – with their placement relying on a personal feeling of where each individual emotion was being felt, for example emotions relating to stress might encircle the face (as if you're feeling the pressure), or tiredness may induce emotions to appear densely around the eyes. This factor has an aesthetic purpose though, as the pin placement was led by the nature of this emotional data set.

This visualisation tells the story of one very fraught day in the midst of my final year at university - the type where you find yourself hyper-ventilating in a corner whilst you rock back and forth, muttering about life-alternating degree failure - hence the disproportionate number of purple pins that are pushed in as far as they'll go, representing 'severe fear'.

Friedman of Smashing Magazine is quoted as saying in 2008 that, "Designers often fail to achieve a balance between design and function, creating gorgeous data visualisations which fail to serve their main purpose — to communicate information".

This visualisation is not a “good”/an immediately clear data visualisation, but it does a job that most others fail to achieve – it creates an emotional response from the viewers, and thus creates an undeniable and often sought-after connection between the data and the visual imagery.

This style of data visualisation doesn't allow you to easily take information from it & manipulate it (like a graph or pie-chart), but the process behind it adds a new dimension to data visualisation. By using harsh materials like pins and the soft canvas of a beautiful human face to plot an elusive and, to some, fuzzy data set using a structured and defined method. The balance between emotion and science hangs perfectly in balance, with the end result not only being a unique data visualisation, but also a striking image in its own right.

The almost sadistic concept of using pins to plot data onto the face invites the viewer to question whether a painful procedure has been inflicted upon the model (and how sadistic I am), particularly when these images are viewed alongside their 3D counterparts of polystyrene heads adorned with pins.

Alternatively, viewers are sometimes convinced of my Photoshop 'whiz-kid' skills, though these weren't employed for this work.

It took over six hours to adhere the imitation pins that I'd made to the very patient model's face. Using cosmetic silicon often used for prosthetics in films, and thin acrylic rods that I'd previously painstakingly painted, the model was transformed into a walking, talking, breathing visualisation – bringing the data truly to life.

Check out Same.As

An uninteresting picture of me doing the talk.

Say 'yes'...

2011-03-09T17:39:00.010Z

'...yes, I would like to visit your website after my perusal on your blog... www.jadedavies.co.uk '

:) New post soon with news of exciting things in the pipeline...

Interview

2010-07-15T13:46:00.004+01:00

Here goes another shameless plug... So, The University of Southampton filmed a short interview with me about a week or so ago to put on their website & youtube channel. I've been avoiding linking to it on here because it's so mortifying...not flattering at all in the voice or face departments. I apologise to those who have to hear me on a daily basis.

However, due to mild forms of peer pressure, it's now here. If you need me, I'll be waiting around in hope that the ground will swallow me up.

Published! Newspapers & Online.

2010-06-20T11:37:00.007+01:00

Published in national newspaper Metro on 17.06.10 :

Online Versions:

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/831406-model-has-pins-and-needles-stuck-onto-her-face

http://e-edition.metro.co.uk/2010/06/17/?p=11&keywords=page+11&sh=true

The University of Southampton Homepage:

The university (which Winchester School of Art is part of) has just changed their homepage to feature my work:

www.soton.ac.uk

With an article about my work following on from this:

http://www.soton.ac.uk/promotion/plotting_human_emotion.shtml

The university used my work as the face of the whole degree show 2010 at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), which was consequently published in two local newspapers (as well as national newspaper Metro) due to the "striking nature" of the images:

http://www.hampshirechronicle.co.uk/news/8228933.Artist__Jade__makes_her_point/

http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/8219193.Pin_work_is_striking_exhibit___/

Self-Image Visualisation.

2010-06-17T18:19:00.003+01:00

Dense glowing red light amongst deep darkness draws attention to areas of great self-consciousness, as my personal body-image worries are physically relayed onto a model's body. Light is used to play with how the minds of women, including myself, often find themselves obsessively agonising over whether others are gawking at their supposedly imperfect body parts.

Exhibition in Shoreditch, London:

Behind the scenes:

More from the shoot:

www.jadedavies.co.uk

jade@jadedavies.co.uk

[Concept/Photography/Art Direction/Production by Jade Davies; Lighting by John Spence; Model - Kayt Webster-Brown.]

Behind The Scenes of 'Emotionalisation'.

2010-06-15T14:41:00.000+01:00

A few photos I took throughout the process of creating this body of work.

Transportation of the heads. Can I check your bags please?

Separating 5000 assorted-colour pins into 6+ colours...during which I lost a few more marbles.

Me performing what looks like surgery on the model, Roisin.

The lovely Roisin, about half-way through the process.

Emotionalisation.

2010-06-15T12:04:00.001+01:00

The human face constantly conveys emotional information through facial expressions, providing an often unconscious window into the vast array of human emotions. Consequently, personal emotional data collected over pre-determined time slots throughout one day is visualised using the human face as the canvas to display the data. The almost sadistic concept of using pins to plot data onto the face invites the viewer to question whether a painful procedure has been inflicted upon the model, particularly when these images are viewed alongside their 3D counterparts of polystyrene heads adorned with pins. Due to the unpredictable and unquantifiable nature of human emotion, the points/pins are plotted in accordance with a sense of where the emotion was felt most in relation to the face; and they are not restricted by a set number of points. Additionally, colour identifies the different core emotions and the depth at which the pins enter the skin describes the intensity of the emotion.

Photos of my work in the Degree Show at Winchester School of Art:

More from the shoot:

www.jadedavies.co.uk

jade@jadedavies.co.uk

[Concept/Photography/Art Direction/Production by Jade Davies; Lighting by John Spence; Model - Roisin Grasby.]

Beginning.

2010-06-14T21:47:00.000+01:00

"If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."

Albert Einstein

This blog will be predominantly used to display my work in a different way to my website - giving you a 'behind the scenes' look at the process behind the final image. Inspiration, musings and more quotes may find their way here too.