Painting!

Subject Matter Project

I have always loved old photographs; the subject matter, the blurred out or bleached out quality of the images and their colour. I wanted to see if by taking my grandmothers old photo album and manipulating the images, like removing details such as the face, would other people relate to them and project their own ideas onto them. I wanted to see if these manipulated photographs or images in conjunction with the damaged frames and the old-fashioned wallpaper would lead people to construct a history for the figures in the photographs. I hoped that the intensely patterned wallpaper and the small cluster of photos would remind people pf a home that they visited, perhaps a grandparent or elderly neighbour, and that people would come to their own conclusion about the history or stories behind the photographs. I looked at artists such as Gerhard Richer, for his blurred out paintings of photographs.  John Stezaker, for his slicing and rearranging of old portraits. Jamie Shovlin, for construction of a fictional character, 'Naomi V. Jelish' and his documentation of her constructed past.  Annette Messager’s clusters of photographs inspired my presentation. 

Materials Project

I began this project looking at the texture of skin and the translucency of it, the layers and the fine blue lines that can be seen underneath. I did some work on this but quickly my interest moved to the lines and wrinkles in an elderly person's skin. I used a variety of materials to try to capture the delicacy and fragility of the skin, to fold and crease it as it would with old age. I began working on a large scale but felt that it didn't represent my idea. The small scale of the work seemed far more delicate and intimate, that you would have to move close to see it properly and not from a distance.

Sculpture and Combined Media

At the beginning this of elective, I was exploring the verb to swaddle (to bind with long, narrow strips of cloth to prevent free movement), but throughout the week my explorations quickly moved to how to en-wrap or bind an object so to protect. And so I began looking at different processes to protect a delicate or fragile object through binding, en-wrapping and encasing. I want to mix rough, harsh materials (like wire and wood) with softer, delicate ones (such as lace or cling film). I knit materials, such as bubble wrap and rope into blankets to swaddle objects aswel as building cases, frames and cages to protect fragile items.

.

Sculpture Contextual

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin is an English artist. She is part of a group known as Britartists or YBAS. Her work takes on a variety of different forms of expression, including needlework, sculpture, drawing, video, installation, photography and painting. 

Alice Maher 

Alice Maher is an artist from county Tipperary, Ireland. She often pushes the boundaries of what is possible with such transient materials. Her work is itself in a state of continuous metamorphosis as her themes and interests have manifested themselves in various forms in the past 20 years.

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons is an artist form York, Pennsylvannia. He is best known for his reprodutions of banal objects, such as Balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-like finish surfaces. 

Meret Oppenheim

Meret Oppenheim was a memeber of the Surrealist Movement. Her juxtaposition of unusual objects and materials explores the subconscious world of dreams, where she drew her inspiration. She forces the disagreeable mixture of sensations on the senses with her work.

Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman is one of Americas most innovative and proactive contemporary artists. He realised that "if I was an artist and I was in 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."

Robert Gober

Robert Gober's work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as cribs, sinks, doors, legs, etc. He plays with the tension between connotations  both emotional and physical, we attach to them and the neutered form. Thus he makes the common uncommon. 

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois was a French-american artist and sculptor, whose perceptions of the body informed her art. Even though her works are abstract, they are quite suggestive of the human form and express themes of betrayal, anxiety and loneliness.