London : January 7th 2011

Today we started off with a tour of Westminster Abbey. The Abbey is absolutely beautiful and i love looking at all the different architecture. I thought it was interesting how half of the architecture was built under one person but then when they added additions to the abbey you can see the material change. I'm glad that they made sure to keep the same design though, because i hate when they add modern additions to older architecture. I just feel like it doesn't look good and ruins the older architecture. I thought we had a wonderful tour guide and i thought it was interesting learning about the grave of the unknown warrior. This is the only grave out of the 3,000 tombs in the abbey that you can't walk on. The warrior is unknown and was one of the 1.1 million killed from the Great War. The grave is surrounded by poppies which are used to remember the event and were also the first flower to grow back after the war. Here are some of the pictures i took outside.

In the afternoon we went to the Tate Britain to view the Rachel Whiteread and Eadweard Muybridge exhibits. Rachel Whiteread is known for her sculptural casts of the spaces in or around familiar domestic objects. This show focused more on her drawings. I enjoyed seeing her thought process in her drawings and the different mediums she uses for her drawings. Whiteread has a great sensitivity of forms and has a great process for working out her thoughts. I especially like her Post Card Studies, they were a different and interesting way to find forms and study them. The only thing i that would have made her show better was to have more of her actual sculptures. I realize that this show was about her drawings but even just a few more examples would have benefited the show so people could see the outcomes of her work more clearly, since many of her drawings are very basic.
Eadward Muybridge was the next exhibit we looked at. Muybridge is a photographer and takes photographs of mostly landscapes. I thought it was amazing how he could freeze the waterfalls and other bodies of water, turning them pure white most of the time. I thought it was interesting to find out he did alter some of his photographs, using different parts of sky with different landscapes. Even though i was amazed he could do this so well, it takes away from the quality i thought his photographs had. I also loved his stereo-lithographs, i didn't realize you could made a 3D image that way.