Graded unit.Experimentation/Research

‘Ophelia’ By John Everett Millais. This pre raphaeite painting I felt connected well with my theme due to the model’s dream like connection with nature.Altho the meaning of the painting has a darker turn as the painting is based on Ophelia from Shakesphere’s Ophelia who sang whilst floating down the river before drowning. I quite like the sinister turn of events as i feel this fits well with my theme.

After collecting a sucession of various items from the abandoned village I decided to make some ‘ready mades’ and then draw continous line drawings from there.Some of these ready mades were a mixture of natural and non-natural found items.As I felt this was important considering that one of the themes is one of people going back to nature and it kind of shows that transition or partial transition through use of materials.One of the ready mades included a corroding saucepan lid and the inner tube of a bike tyre.I felt encouraged to use both these items as I felt they were representative of hobbies that people may be rediscovering currently or doing more of since their infrastructure has crumbled.

After making a dream catcher like item from the inner of the bike tube in order to make a connection with the native Americans i then decided to transform it into a pagan like headpiece by adding pieces of bark and wild flowers.

My partner owns a gas mask which I decided to use whilst wearing the headpiece as i felt that it connected well with the surgical masks people are currently wearing but also to an era where people may of been feeling emotions similar to what they are feeling now.Such as fear,vunerabilty and numbness.I also created a stick which I tied a plastic cable and bolt to which i found in the woods my ititial reaction whilst creating it was thinking of the spirit stick a Native American may of used during ritual/ceremonys but during the photo’s it had a different effect and started to look quite threatening and more like a weapon. Also getting feedback from peers and a thought i had myself is that i feel like the clothing either needs to go or prehaps experimentation with symbolic marks on the body using the red clay like mud which is very much present in this part of scotland.

Initially i took the photo’s with a stone wall in the background but I realised that the headpiece was soon being lost to the background as the colours merged too much and i felt that we needed greenery in the background in order for it to ‘pop’ and it order for the idea to better connect to nature.On the day of the shoot it was really sunny so much so that at times it was hard to get the right angle without the shadow of the photographer falling onto the model.What I did like tho was the rainbow like effect that was brought on by the sun.Also the angle my partner shot the photo’s of me from wasn’t the angle i was looking for but worked suprisingly well as due to his height it looked like I was being looked down on and gave quite an intimidating effect.I then decided to follow on from that by walking round the model and getting my partner to walk around me whilst filming.I felt that this gave the feeling that there was something out there watching you that you have no control of and yet it controls you just like the panidemic has done with many people.

In the first video you will noticed I have left me talking to my partner (Louis) in at the beggining of the video as it has quite a muffled yet eerie effect which I like.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nlQfDJWrLeyYTyRbe7ZW7yMPA7Jjrs-H

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ncR28kCXrYl6HOxosolxmbmC5dJQ4j3J

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1n7I5YORRb-L3KPCSIE6i90rz56DW5GFi

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nO-NmXnGPJtbXbClo2ThJDgKadTy-YaO

I have started to experiement with line drawings of the photo’s and what i hope to do is pick out shapes from these line drawrings and try to connect them with shapes within nature in order to make some kind of symbols out of them.

Whilst shooting photo’s in the woods I found stones by the river which had very primitive looking marks on them.I found this very interesting and it has given me inspiration for using a stick with some of the afore mentioned red clay mud in order to make similar marks.

Aboriginal cave painting which uses similar markings as thoose found on the rocks.

I then discovered what turned out to be a rats skull. (It’s jaw lay seperatley) I hope to experiment with my use of this.

Graded Unit Research

After mind-mapping three of the potential themes we have been given for our graded unit I found that the themes I found the most inspiration from was Ritual and commemoration,home and displacement and the natural world.

I decided that Ritual and commemoration worked best as due to the current outbreak of the coronavirus the normal infrastructure of society was broken as we are all currently in quarantine. This means that the every day rituals we take part in are temporarily no more and the human race have now stepped back in time and are re-connecting with nature and appreciating/worshipping ways of life that are perhaps not from this era.

I started to research pagan/native Indian rituals on ledgendsofamerica.com and https://www.patheos.com/library/pagan/ritual-worship-devotion-symbolism/rites-and-ceremonies and looked at symbols and instruments that are within common use in these societies.Whilst researching these I was reminded of the wicker man and Midsommar which I have only watched recently. I found the Wickerman to be really dated in its views and sexualisation of women but I liked the masks that were worn within the film and the creation of the woven sculptural element of The Wickerman itself.

Symbolic imagery used in ‘The Wicker man’ The idea of the wickerman came from the pre-druid age.Evidence of similar sacrificial sculptures have been found in Ireland from the pre-Rome era.
Lots of strong ritualistic symbolism is used throughout Midsommar.Altho there is alot of gore it is often ironically contrasted against floral imagery.

Midsommar I was absolutely fascinated with due to it’s use of symbolism and strong often disturbing use imagery using the human form and illustration painted on the wall. Over the last couple of projects, I had come to realise that my work can be dark and I hope that this film may hold an influence over my current project even tho my work can sometimes have a dark humoured side to it.

I started to look at items within nature. Items which had been reclaimed, buildings that had been abandoned and overgrown and abandoned items within buildings.As this is something that genuinely interests me I know this will be the driving force behind my project aswell as my interest in the practice of the native indians and Pagans.

Inspired by Rauschenbergs combine’s I started to experiment with found objects creating installation within the abandoned buildings. The installations started to slowly more and more turn into shrines. Planks of shaped wood perhaps used for structure in one part of the building started to take on a ritualistic shape of its own.

‘Short Circuit’ by Rauscenberg
I find visually interesting the aesthetics of this piece which using a varying degree of different materials which you don’t often find together

Upon exploring we discovered a dead rat and pheasant. As grim as it may sound, I did consider adding them into the installation as food was often something offered to the gods during pagan and native Indian rituals. I also considered putting the rat into the noose to signify the temporary end of the ‘rat race’(I own care gloves so health and safety wise this wouldn’t be an issue)

‘Self portrait with skull’ by Sarah Lucas. Altho the meaning of this self portrait is more about Sarah’s reflection of herself I like this mix of alive and dead and think this idea will work well in the future of my project.

‘To age is not a crime’ Major project developmental work/refined work then final piece

I started to bring together the images of the chicken I had created with some new performative pieces.

I wanted to really focus on the distorted view of the eye of the beholder and prehaps someone suffering with Body Dysmorphia disorder and exaggerate that as much as possible.Along with the cycle/construction and horror grim aspect of surgery and the unexpected turn of events in terms of the outcome not allways being what that person wants.

Above are images of the sewn together chicken skin from earlier work which I consider as strong developmental pieces towards the final piece along with some of the work below as it displays the gruesome reality and brutality of plastic surgery.As I said before I would liked to of experimented/explored further with the chicken but due to the current panidemic and shortages in shops I’ve decided to use the image of the chicken in with performative pieces.

I think this photo works great amongst the other developmental pieces as it shows the power play between the surgeon and the client.

In these refined pieces I again use the power play between the surgeon and the client, to show the cycle of surgery,she has clearly had surgery but the hand positioning of the surgeon shows that he is further distorting the face and potentially showing the client where there is more room for improvement and thus the cycle continues.I also wanted to ’embrace the horror’ as mentioned in my last crit by cutting and copying parts of the previous chicken images i have used and applying these to the face.

Not being an expert in the photoshop area i understand the images may look a bit amateur,altho timely to complete due to my inexperience,but i feel that it is enough to get across the point I want to make and it crosses the question one of the tutors asked me a while ago in a crit of :’does it really matter if the image isn’t visually pretty?’

Final piece

Mirror Mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all?

In this piece i really wanted to look at the body dysmorphia side of things.The magnifying glass is being held to the eye in order to distort any faults aswell as magnify them.But what the viewer doesn’t know is who is holding the magnifying glass?Is it the surgeon or the client?

I also wanted two different views to show what we see and what the person see’s and once again embracing the horror by adding one of the ‘chicken parcels’ to her head.

I think the worst part of all of this and something I really wanted to bring attention to is the fact that a percentage of surgeon’s are playing on people’s insecurities/mental disorders and by doing this they are going against the hypocratic oath of which they are sworn into where they pledge never to do harm and to save people’s lifes.

I really want this image to play games with the viewers head and to give them the same feeling that someone with BDD may have.

I consider this piece as my final piece as it has been really successful in getting across all the points I wanted to make all tho visually I feel that the chicken piece on the head looks a bit like a phallus.But nobody seems to agree with me!

Major Project ‘To Age is not a crime’

For our FMP we were given a variety of themes that we could use but I decided to use my own theme.

Working between two ideas.The post stick notes feature stand out comments and questions from articles.

To start with I was stuck between two ideas.One was how female ageing is portrayed by the media and how women are treated in the tv/film industry due to age.

The second one was inspired by a video I watched where female celebrities were asked intrusive questions based on the fact that they are female and not focusing on there career. Some of these questions were:

  • ‘Where you able to wear undergarments? (when the male presenter recieved a shocked response) ‘Is this inappropiate?!?’
  • ‘If you could pick make-up or your phone which one would you pick?’
  • ‘What are you looking for in a man now?’
  • Your gonna walk home with more then just a trophy tonight.I think lots of men!’
  • ‘There is one subject we didn’t talk about…Your Breasts!’
  • ‘Aren’t you worried that people will pick up on the sexual references and not care about your music?’

I decided to choose the first idea as it seemed to generate the most questions.I also found alot of interesting articles which had some stand out ‘pro ageing’ comments aswell ascomments which brought attention to certain issues

Some of these comments were:

  • Ageing is not a crime
  • Invisable women
  • Ageing has no cure
  • Ageing isn’t a disaese
  • Why is ageing treated like a problem to be solved?
  • ‘Women cast as players in a doomed quest for eternal youth

I thought about writing these slogans onto suffragette style posters,and also sewing them onto orange skin and doccumenting the skin ageing and how the writing changes on it as it does.I felt that orange skin would be an interesting choice of material due to it’s skin like pores and texture and the fact that it ages.I also considered creating some kind of mask using the peel too.

Conceptual Project Group Crit

Image choosen as final image as i felt that this best represented the theme in terms of how PTSD effects ex war veterans due to the story a friend of mine told me from experience (see last post)

Some feedback I recieved from tutors/classmates was that the photo was

  • comical/yet sinister.
  • Do the eyes have to look like eyes or could I use something else in replacement of them?
  • Do the eyes have to be on a person?
  • Has a look of animie about it.
  • Difficult to corrolate meaning
  • Will i decide to let conceptual inform my future practice?
  • The artist in residence mentioned that prehaps i should look at an artist who’s name she can’t remember but whom uses parts of magazines on her face.
  • Artist in residence suggested using the app called ‘face tune’ which is the app that Cindy Sherman has been using within her current work.There is also filters on the Mac that can give you ‘long eyes’
  • Prehaps i should stick the eyes on and stand in different public places and film using a timelapse.Would be interesting to see the public’s response.Also having the eyes on whilst doing every day things about the house or maybe just lying in bed looking at the ceiling.
  • The tutor commented that the piece was very performative and had good future performative potential there was still more that could be tested and developed.She also mentioned that I should prehaps concentrate more on the idea which is serious and move away from the visual comical aspect.

Conceptual Art

After my one to one with the tutor we looked at what worked and what didn’t work and at making my ideas clearer in order to help with the creative process.I took my two ideas and wrote them down and looked at which one could get my idea across most simply.I realised that my ideas weren’t clear enough and the tutor discussed with me how my idea was the most important thing more important then the visual aspect and to focus in on the most simple approach visually and not to over complicate things.

One of my ideas had been about carrying weight physically due to weight being carried mentally and the connection between these two things.How does one effect the other?Altho I liked the idea the visual was too complex and I was concerned that the audience/viewer wouldn’t understand the meaning behind my work as i felt that it could relay many other meanings which wasn’t neccessarily what I wanted.

In contrast,my second idea had the opposite set of issues,the visual idea was simple,yet strong but my idea had become almost lost along the way. The idea had been one of wearing a mask to cope with deep seated issues inside,but it would make no sense as to why the mask was only covering the eyes.

So I decided to go back to the ‘drawing board’ so to speak.I looked at my last theme of PTSD as i felt that there was so much more to explore.I decided to look at how PTSD effects ex war veterans.A friend of mine was effected by this and I remember him saying that he would enter every room/situation with his ‘eyes wide open’ allways on edge,waiting at any minute for an explosion.And that someone once banging a packet of crisps in a canteen made him duck for cover under a table.He told me he was fed up and exsausted by living this way.It also made me think of homeless ex-veterans almost having to relieve the same experience all over again but on the streets,constantly on edge and wary of what could happen next.It is a trained mind-set within war but did they really think this is what it would end up being used for?

I decided to look at different ways i could develop this idea so I decided to use animated/exsagerated paper cartoon looking eyes using different sizes of pupils and paper.I did this as I wanted to emphasize the constant fear/lack of trust in the environment surrounding that person.By accident I realised that the tilt of my head and the fed up looking expression (that i had done without realising) Was effective in portraying how exsausting it can be.

Here are two video’s where i experimented with taking the eyes off to reveal different eyes with different pupils which reveal different levels of shock/awareness

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1R4fDGxR_tfcUBBq-X6xrHhxSPnrMzfId

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1REJ3gBxYWPVlGmEB7ZUihybrukKyShEU

Conceptual practice

I decided to look at weight bearing with bricks again.And how weight bearing on different parts of the body can not only be a physical thing which we can see such as a pregnancy etc but mental weight can effect different elements of the body also giving way to different conditions such as IBS.

In the following video’s i looked at balancing weight on different parts of my body and the unpredictability of it.I felt a slight anxiousness never knowing what would drop when.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PhxH-IespO4yaH0TNpuBX0sucTrKr8pn

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PImrwrrdvmdC_ttwJ7Yjzi3PMQnEVo1r

In the second video i thought about how weight from our minds can travel to certain parts of the body.Without really thinking about it we are adding weight to our own backs as stress can cause related pain within our bodies.Studies have shown that increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol can cause related pain within our bodies.

Conceptual work.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Psc_WJxUAEYW-Vcf4np2GHCJoIuV1Mlp

Using face paint I decided to look at the mask people use every day to cover up the weight bearing on their mind. this can either be through make-up or facial expression.A mask to show how awake they are when there mind has shut down

I wanted to show how this mask can be washed away over time whether through use of water which is a very spiritually clensing material.I realised after filming the video that it looked like someone being blessed.Which i realised could be another way of clensing mental weight even if it wasn’t the end result that I was intending.

I patriculary like the unpredictable manner of which the paint travels in droves across my face.As unpredicatable as the action of someone with such a weight on their mind.

I find some comparisons between my work and the work of Bas Jan Arder especially with the way the facepaint has started to look like tears and the way my eyes look red from crying

https://images.app.goo.gl/WVfdyaVUMPwuZMe48

I

Four Conceptual Artists

 Sean Preschoux

Sebastian Preschoux is a 35 year old self taught french artist.His work represents the fast industrial rate at which today’s generation disposes of images and cease to ask themselves what the source of these images are.He believes that due to computers you can make everything face paced and flattering which encourages people to ‘fake it’ he has said in an interview ‘‘nothing personal,nothing unique’.He strives to make work that can’t easily be re-produced and is often temporary.His yarn installations come from his graphic works and are from his observations of the sunlight in nature.His recent graphic works are created using ink and based on spirographs and thread tensions which he also uses acrylic paint for.

He also enjoys working in nature as there is no one to disturb him and finds tree’s great to work with as they are a ‘very solid’ construction.His yarn installations work well in these environments as they have a ‘geometric climate’ in an environment which has absolutely nothing graphic about it to begin with. 

Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-loringhoven

 Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven was born 12th July 1874 and died 15th Dec 1927 She was a German avant-garde,Dadaist artist and poet who worked for several years in Greenwich Village New York. photo Loringhoven was born in Germany, to Adolf Plötz, a mason, and Ida Marie Kleist. Her relationship with her father was temperamental—she emphasized how controlling he was in the family, as well as how cruel, yet big-hearted he was.In her art, she related the ways that political structures promote masculine authority in family settings, maintaining the state’s patriarchal societal order.Her discontent with her father’s masculine control may have fostered her anti-patriarchal activist approach to life. On the other hand, the relationship that she had with her mother was full of admiration—her mother’s craft involving the repurposing of found objects could have spawned Freytag-Loringhoven’s utilization of street debris/found objects in her own artworks Photo In New York, the Baroness also worked on assemblage, sculptures and paintings, creating art out of the rubbish and refuse she collected from the streets. The Baroness was known to construct elaborate costumes from found objects, creating a “kind of living collage” that merged the boundaries between life and art.

The Baroness’ elaborate costumes both criticized and challenged the notions of feminine beauty and economic worth.She adorned herself with objects such as spoons, tin cans, and curtain rings, as well as street debris that she came across.The Baroness’ use of her own body as medium was deliberate, to transform herself into a specific type of spectacle—one that women who complied to the constraints of femininity of the time would be humiliated to embody. By doing so, she controlled and established agency over the visual access to her own nudity, unhinged the presentational expectations of femininity by appearing androgynous, drew upon ideas of women’s selfhood and sexual politics, and provided emphasis on her anti-consumerism and anti-aestheticism outlooks.She included her body’s smells, perceived imperfections, and leakages in her body art, encompassing Irrational Modernism.The Baroness’ body art was not only a sculpture and living collage, but also a form of dadaist performance art and activism.  

It is thought that ‘Fountain’ (1917) by Marcel Duchamp is also connected to the Baroness

Yves Klein 

Yves Klein was born 28 April 1928 and died 6th June 1962 he was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau realisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art.  

Anthropometry of the Blue Period (ANT 82) (1960), Pure pigment and synthetic resin on paper laid down on canvas

Klein was born in Nice, in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France. His parents, Fred Klein and Marie Raymond were both painters. His father painted in a loose post impressionist style, while his mother was a leading figure in Art Informel, and held regular soirées with other leading practitioners of this Parisian abstract movement. Klein received no formal training in art, but his parents were both painters who exposed him to different styles. His father was a figurative style painter, while his mother had an interest in abstract expressionism. From 1942 to 1946, Klein studied at the École Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales. At this time, he became friends with Arman (Armand Fernandez) and Claude Pascal and started to paint. Photo Unaware of the importance of the Nouveau Réalisme movement until the 1990s, New York critics of Klein’s time tried to classify him as neo-dada and other critics, such as Thomas McEvilley in an essay submitted to Artforum in 1982, classified Klein as an early, though enigmatic, postmodernist.

Bruce Nauman 

 

Schaulager

Bruce Nauman was (born December 6, 1941 in Fort Wayne Indiana) and is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo,New Mexico.

Nauman studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and art with William T Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California.. In 1964 he gave up painting to dedicate himself to sculpture, performance and cinema collaborations with William Allan and Robert Nelson. He worked as an assistant to Wayne Thiebaud . Upon graduation, he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the University of California at Irvine.Confronted with “What to do?” in his studio soon after graduating, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.Nauman set up a studio in a former grocery shop and then in a sublet from his university tutor. These two locations provided the setting for a series of performed actions which he captured in real time, on a fixed camera, over the 10-minute duration of a 16mm film reel.Between 1966 and 1970 he made several videos, in which he used his body to explore the potentials of art and the role of the artist, and to investigate psychological states and behavioural codes.

Much of his work is characterized by an interest in language, often manifesting itself as visual puns

Much of his work is characterized by an interest in language, often manifesting itself as visual puns