Xander Merricks
A Brief Bio
Hi, welcome. I am on a placement at the Fablab at Brighton University from a degree in Product Design. I am endlessly overwhelmed with project ideas leaving many things partially completed or just piles of parts. I enjoy working with other people and helping other people in a communal learning process. I was initially drawn to the Fablab and Fabacademy system due to its approach to information dissemination and the flexibility of design scope. I think the collaborative approach is very effective at diversifying creative output. I think my feelings on this subject have been pushed further by exposure to Noisebridge and Strange Parts on YouTube.
I am especially interested in E-waste and the capacity for using E-waste components to build production machines, from the ground up.
I try my hand at photography here and there, I really enjoy the process of creating something from nothing simply using your perspective. Something magical about creation there I think.
This image was created whilst I was cycling, I like that with a light painting image, either the camera can move or the lights can move.
I did a project on benches and urban seating during my second year. I found it increasingly interested what people were prepared to do in the urban environment. Benches seemed to separate people from their surrounding world in interesting ways.
I am occasionally a painter, trying hard to convince myself to try out the oils set I have. The 'fish' are watercolour and paint pens (Posca) on canvas.
I started drawing on this canvas quite some time ago, but decided to cover the parts I disliked most with purple wax because I wanted to see what pouring wax would be like. Whilst organising my acrylic paints a couple were very close to being empty so I just squeezed them out onto the canvas to have a play as I'd not used acrylics for years.
I got rather sucked into doing different bits here and there. I was trying to get a wide range of the feeling of painting, and got engrossed in the way the different materials interact; how the wax reacts to different paints, how the paints react to each other, how the dryness of the paints matter.
Here are a couple of minor details. I love photographing paintings, and got caught thinking on it when I realised Penguin books use painting or artistic details as book covers. The frame directs the mind's eye in a way the overall painting never could, photography seems to me to be a snapshot of the rhizomatic multiplicity of life.
Our Lab
There's a dome in our lab which is intended for use as a VR space, I think it'll be pretty cool, it's pretty huge so hard to photograph, so here's a bit of one of the sides.
