Online Foundation Art & Design
Exhibition of student artworkYear 1 - OFCAD show / Foundation Certificate course
Year 2 - OFDAD show / Foundation Diploma course
Jack Lord
Title: At the Table
My line of inquiry was “grief, through eating a crab”. I drew a crab claw taken home from a seafood restaurant. I visited twice: once with my mum, and the second time almost a year after her death. Drawing that crab claw made me look closely at the forms its shell takes: a boundary, capable of crushing, defence, and attack.
Early on, I was also thinking about grief as improvisational. You work with what is left, filling gaps with whatever is available, often quickly and without much choice. That inspired some quick sculptural work.
I began to look at related material. The tools used to eat crabs introduced ideas of force, pressure and violence. Japanese woodblock imagery, particularly Mori Mitsuchika’s The Demon-Faced Crab for Warding Off Illness, suggested the shell as a surface for faces and masks.
I then related this to Aubrey Levinthal, whose work distorts and unsettles everyday scenes without becoming abstract. This helped me think about how distortion could operate within recognisable images.
