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CRITICAL EVALUATION

Through the mediums of photography, video art, sound and painting, I have used my art to explore my own emotions during the past year of lockdown, including my struggles with mental health and identity. For my final submission, I have created a collection of works that conveys a journey through my various headspaces through visual and audio distortions, abstracting the everyday world into something uncertain and unfamiliar. I chose to work in a variety of mediums because, building off of my work last semester, I am interested in not pinning myself down to one way of working because I enjoy experimenting. In the last few months, I have also taken part in a number of workshops ran by the EMS department which have informed technological aspect of my work, particularly my use of video mapping that I have used in my final submission.

The ways in which I have chosen to work have also been influenced by a number of contemporary artists such as Rachel De Joode, Tony Oursler, Shana Moulton and Francesca Woodman. I feel like what links all of these artists together is their viewing of the human body through an abstracted or distorted lens and often, particularly in the case of Moulton and Woodman, the inner turmoil of the human experience comes across in the way that the artists use their own body in their work. In this semester I have grown in confidence in using myself and my experiences as the subject matter and performing in my own work has been quite a learning curve in confidence for me. I am allowing my art to become an open space channelling and dealing with my emotions.

The art represents a personal journey of my various anxieties, yet I am hoping that that people can relate to the emotion behind my work for what truly drives me to create is to open up a safe space for conversation about mental health through presenting these weird and distorted headspaces. I am pleased with how I have managed to overcome my fear of being personal in my work and I like how all of the pieces in my final collection are very different, but all convey a feeling of warped reality and uncertainty to varying degrees depending on my headspace during their creation.

This semester has involved a lot of experimentation with a lot of different ways of working, which I really enjoyed! However, I believe that the fact that I have jumped around from different mediums a lot as lead to some work that isn’t as polished as it could be. I think next year I would really like to focus on the combination of digital and traditional art that I began at the end of this semester. Thematically, I am really happy with my growth in confidence over the last few months to do with me being able to be open about my personal life through my art which was something I found really difficult to do prior, so I think moving on from here I would like for my life to keep inspiring my art and art to keep inspiring my life as it has done this semester.

My goals for next semester are to keep growing in confidence with how I can channel my personal experiences through my art and hone in on techniques I have experimented on throughout this first year. I am also looking forward to paying more attention to how my work will be physically exhibited in a post-covid world and begin searching for opportunities to get my art seen outside of uni.

#art #fine art #artist #art student

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EXHIBITION PROPOSAL

The collection of works that I have submitted for this model are part of a multimedia collection titled I HAVE BEEN TAKING CARE. It is made up of five pieces/series of works and despite there being a range of mediums on show, including painting, installation, video and sound works, they all work together to create one installation that takes the audience on a journey through my headspace during lockdown and by extension become more in touch with their own mental and physical states. It is the final product of the experimental work I have been doing throughout this semester where in which I was heavily inspired by my own mental wellbeing and my experiences of being in a mental and physical state of transition. I like to think that the combination of the works I have selected convey my turbulent emotions in a concise way, guiding the viewer between solid and lucid states through fluctuating distortions in visuals and audio. Overall themes of this work include isolation during lockdown, gender identity, depression, anxiety and, on a brighter note, the process of overcoming these things. Depending on how the collection is viewed, it can either be interpreted as a declining state of wellbeing or an improving one – the latter being how I have experienced making these works. I am hoping that my audience can find solace in the strangeness of my artwork in this collection and resonate with people facing with any of the themes mentioned, even if it’s just the fact that they are not the only person out there struggling navigating their own journey of wellbeing.

In an exhibition setting, this collection would require both a well lit space to display the paintings and also a dark space to showcase the video and projection work. If presented in our studio, I would imagine that one of the separate rooms would be used for the latter, while the paintings are displayed on the wall outside.Alternatively, if I had more time and expertise, I would love to display my paintings and still digital work on a Lightbox within the darkened installation space so that everything could be experienced together. I feel like this would really lend itself well to the nature of the works because of them being a hybrid between traditional and digital mediums and displaying on a Lightbox is not unlike displaying on a screen. This is perhaps something I would like to explore more next year when I can pay more attention to the space in which my work is to be exhibited.

1. I HAVE BEEN TAKING CARE

These paintings represent me at my most grounded and least distorted, yet still there is an uncomfortableness about them which is a running theme in my art. They reference my often apathetic relationship with looking after myself by having the face mask, a representation of typical “self-care” and “wellness”, hang limply off my face. They act as a kind of pathetic shield from the outer world, which is partly in reference to the unproductive coping mechanisms a lot of us employ when we are not in a great mental state. The piece focuses on tensions between the inner and outer body, as well as themes of body image, wellness and mental health.

2. I HAVE BEEN TAKING CARE (remix)

These pieces are a “remix” of the previous paintings, due to the fact that they are the same pieces but manipulated in Photoshop to represent distortions in reality and how I view myself. This is the beginning of the art in the collection becoming less grounded in reality as different versions of myself are merging and melting into each other.

3. JUICE TASTES FUNNY AFTER I’VE BRUSHED MY TEETH

This series of pieces are an extension of the previous pieces and the decent into complete distortion of my physical form. As in the first pieces where I am wearing a face mask, in these paintings I am brushing my teeth, referencing back to the themes of physical wellness and hygiene - the things that are usually the first to go when descending into a bad mental state.

4. SKIN CLOUD

As you enter the second room of the collection, which is kept dim due to the nature of the work, you are greeted by an average pillow slumped against the wall like a resigned looking figure. A projected onto it is close up videos of my skin/body parts, making it the most intimate and personal piece in the collection. This references back to the distortion of my body that is evident in the 2D work previously in the collection. It is not inherently clear what is being projected onto the pillow because at a glance it just looks like abstract colours and textures, which links to much of my work this semester which has been focused on making the familiar unfamiliar. This piece links more into my gender identity more than any other because looking at the body this close up means that you can’t tell if I am male or female and this represents a changing attitude towards my body.

5. Incoherence + Nonsense

The collection concludes with Incoherence + Nonsense, a video/spoken word piece projected onto the back room. In this piece, my body is almost completely obscured by the editing, heavily contrasting with SKIN CLOUD which displays my body so explicitly that it becomes unrecognisable. The video consists of a film of me speaking from a diary entry I wrote during lockdown, edited so that the sentences are reargued until the narrative was completely disjointed. I then projected this video onto various surfaces in my bedroom and edited them in this ethereal and ghostlike way. There is a soft piano track in the background for added ambience. The overall vibe of the piece is unsettling and descends into a crescendo of audio and visuals. This is the ultimate example of my mental state being detached from the physical world which is what the whole collection was building up to.

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FINAL SUBMISSION

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SKIN CLOUD

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Making SKIN CLOUD

SKIN CLOUD is my final piece of practical work for this semester, and I feel like it captures a lot of what I've been thinking about over the last few months, both in terms of the medium I've used and the topics it addresses. It covers a variety of subjects, the most important of which is my own experience with depression, which I believe many people can relate to. I've drawn parallels between the properties of the human body and the soft furnishings in which we seek security and spend so much of our time. I've merged close-up footage of my body and the pillows/blanket to suggest that there is no difference between myself and my bed, which is something I've felt while I've been going through a particularly bad mental health period.

Some initial sketches as I was coming up with the idea for this piece

Also, I think it's important to mention that the footage's close-up nature ties into a lot of the work I've been doing this semester, because I've always been fascinated by the abstracted forms that can be found when you zoom in on anything. When viewed on a micro level, familiar objects can seem alien, and this is what I was going for with my own physical form here. Since the spectator of the piece can't say whether it's a body, let alone if it's male or female, it alludes to my struggles with gender identity.

Artwork by Rachel De Joode

Rachel De Joode's work, especially her POROSITY series, served as inspiration for this piece. She has photographed different materials super close up in this series so that you can concentrate more on their textural properties rather than their overall shape or function, abstracting the materials in the same way that I tried to do with my body in SKIN CLOUD. Rather than displaying her images on a wall, she has opted to put them on pedestals in these organic-looking blob-like forms, which are close to how I have attempted to make my bed look like an organic form.

As you can see in this video, I used this piece using Madmapper, which is a projection mapping program that I learned how to use in a EMS department workshop a few weeks back. I created shapes in the program that were the same as the silhouette of the pillows/duvet. The video output crops to this shape which is how I was able to get the video only onto the pillows and not outside of it. I set this up in my bedroom, but in the future I would love to recreate this piece on a larger scale in a bigger space because it was so fun to film and make. It is a shame that seeing it in video doesn't quite do it justice but hopefully one day I can hone in on the techniques used in this piece to create an installation based off of it.

#art #fine art #artist #art student #projection #installation #trans artist #projection art #installation art #video art #abstraction #Vimeo

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FINAL SUBMISSION PLAN

With the end of this year in sight, I am beginning to think about ways in which I can bring together my practice into a carefully selected collection of works that summarise the ideas I have developed in the last few months. I plan on creating a multimedia exhibition of my work that includes a variety of different mediums such as painting, video art, sound and projection mapping. The overall theme of this collection will mirror the mental journey I have been on throughout the past year, which has been the main drive of my work. The pieces will vary from more solid and abstract forms and will convey my fluctuations in mental and physical wellbeing through the distortion of audio and visuals.

I will include the 2D works that are in the previous few posts and also my video piece called Incoherence + Nonsense, which I made earlier in this semester. These are two very different works, and so to tie these together, and to display the skills I have learned to do with video mapping with the EMS workshops, my final piece of practical work this semester will be a combination of soft sculpture and projection art. The idea is to have videos of my skin/close up parts of my body projected onto various soft furnishings like pillows and duvets so that they look like abstracted blobs of flesh. I am trying to link together the similarities between the properties of my body and the soft furnishings that I spend so much time wrapping myself in and combining them to imply that there is no distinction between myself and my bed.

So overall, my submission will consist of 9 pieces of 2D artwork (being my paintings and the digital distortions of those paintings), my short video piece Incoherence + Nonsense, and a new projection/soft sculpture piece that I am planning on making next.

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JUICE TASTES FUNNY AFTER I'VE BRUSHED MY TEETH

This series of pieces are an extension of the previous pieces and the decent into complete distortion of my physical form. As in the first pieces where I am wearing a face mask, in these paintings I am brushing my teeth, referencing back to the themes of physical wellness and hygiene - the things that are usually the first to go when descending into a bad mental state.

#art #fine art #artist #art student #experiment #painting #gouache #gouache painting #portrait #distortion #weirdcore

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DISTORTED PAINTINGS

A lot of my work so far in this semester has been digital, focusing mainly on photography, film and projection. Yet, I have really enjoyed how my recent series of paintings I HAVE BEEN TAKING CARE have incorporated themselves in my practice, showing growth both artistically and personally and that I am not afraid to take my art in new directions. However, in my most recent tutorial, it was suggested to me that I should try and combine my interests in both traditional and digital art which is what I have attempted to do here.

For these experiments, I used photoshop to distort the paintings I had done previously and I ended up with some really exciting results which I believe add to the paintings and give them another layer of meaning. Morphing the paintings is much more akin to the type of work I was doing previously that was to do with transition and liminality and I think its an interesting way of combining the aspects of my art that are interested in both traditional mediums and digital art.

I feel like these paintings cover a lot of themes such as body image, physicality, and my trans identity but still themes of distortion and uncertainty, which I want as a theme for my final submission. Going forward I would like to make some more paintings with the intention of distorting them to submit as a final series of work.

#art #artist #fine art #art student #painting #gouache #gouache painting #portrait #queer art #trans artist #distortion #experimental #weirdcore

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I HAVE BEEN TAKING CARE

These paintings are a lot different to my practice so far but I think they signify an important thematic shift in my art and reflect a lot of personal and artistic growth. As evident in a lot of my art, I spend a lot of time focusing on my internal headspace and I often reflect this by portraying myself as a lucid and ghostlike figure, like in my photography series Between States. However, these paintings portray myself as a more grounded form and focus both on my internal and external body.

This series of paintings reference my often apathetic relationship with looking after myself by having the face mask, a representation of typical “self-care” and “wellness”, hang limply off my face. They act as a kind of pathetic shield from the outer world, which is partly in reference to the unproductive coping mechanisms a lot of us employ when we are not in a great mental state. The piece focuses on tensions between the inner and outer body, as well as themes of body image, wellness and mental health. When I was making these, I had the work of Shana Moulton in the back of my mind, an artist how has been a reoccurring inspiration during this semester; her series of works Whispering Pines center around her alter ego Cynthia’s journeys with self-improvement and spiritual wellness through the medium of video art.

I am really pleased with how I was able to replicate the wet and translucent texture of the face mask, which gives me more confidence to be more experimental with the textures I paint. I think the face mask is a really interesting addition to a portrait and I am going to go on to think about what other unconventional elements can I include in portrait painting.

#art #fine art #artist #art student #painting #gouache #gouache painting #portrait

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MORE GLASS EXPERIMENTS

Here are a few experiments in which I looked at how photographing through a glass of water would result in blurred and distorted images. I used Photoshop to layer these images on top of each other and boost the saturation, and I love how fresh and green they look. Despite the fact that they are still not fully formed or concrete, I believe they represent hope and growth.

#art #fine art #artist #art student #photography #experimental photography #plants #experiment

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BEER GARDEN BLUES

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INSTALLATION IDEAS

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NEW INSTALLATION SPACE

These are some videos of me tentatively experimenting with my new studio space for making art. I'm still undecided about how I'll use this room, but I began by projecting the "uncanny flora" experiments I've done in the past onto the walls. I was a little discouraged after this day in the studio because having a completely blank space to work in feels a little like being faced with an unfinished canvas, uncertain of what the first mark should be. Despite the fact that I'm stuck for ideas right now, I'd like to keep experimenting in this space and I am happy that I came out of it at least achieving these videos. 

#art #fine art #artist #art student #art studio #installation #experiment #video art #projection #Vimeo

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close up foliage

With these experiments here I am going back to an aesthetic and process that was also apparent when I did my projections in the snow pieces. Here, I have taken very close up videos of various plants and flowers around my house and moved around them, as if filming from a first-person point of view. I then inverted the colours of the film and adjusted their appearance to give them this colourful and abstract look.

The juxtaposition between taking something very natural and making it look unrecognisable, and perhaps futuristic/computer generated, is a transformative process that I feel links in well with my work. I’ve inverted the colours from greens, a colour with heavy connotations with the natural world, to artificial looking pinks, blues, and purples which I associate with technology. I am interested in the way that the natural and digital world can be intertwined and distorted and mashed together, or how the traditional and digital can be combined.

I also feel like these link to my work because these videos feel unrecognisable to what I was originally filming. They could perhaps take on the appearance of a new, alien landscape, something so unfamiliar, which links to other aspects of my work where I have discussed presenting something on a micro scale appear to be on a macro scale.

I think that these videos could be incorporated well into my projection mapping work and I am excited to continue making short clips like these to use in my installation work.

#art #fine art #artist #art student #video art #moving image #foliage #abstract #experimental film

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Thoughts about my work 22-03-2021

In my last update, I stated that my main goals going forward were to push myself out of my comfort zone and to keep learning and experimenting with different ways of working. Over the last couple of weeks, I have had a down period with my mental health meaning that I haven’t been super productive. However, I have produced a few experiments that I am pleased with and could be seed for further experiments in the next few weeks.

My main interest at the moment has been space; How can a vast environment be found in something small? An example of how I have explored the idea of space and scale has been when I photographed/filmed the inside of a projector. The mirrors on the inside of the projector create multiple overlapping images of the thing you are projecting and when you examine them, they begin to look a bit like galaxies. I like the idea of something really small being perceived to be much faster than what it is in real life because there's a fantastic metaphor in that about the ability of us as humans to be much more than the sum of our parts. In reality, we are all just clusters of atoms, insignificant compared to the whole universe, however, we are individually capable of making a huge impact.

I have also been doing some experiments with photoshop and trying to create some abstract, experimental pieces. Digital art making lends itself well to achieving precision that could not be done with the human hand alone. However, recently I have been interested in ways that computers can be unpredictable and explore how functions in programs such as Photoshop can achieve results reminiscent of more traditional art making mediums. Letting go of control and expectation as if I was letting gravity pull paint down a canvas or experimenting with how different mediums formally interact. Mostly I have started with an image and manipulating it until it is unrecognisable and completely abstract - editing it into oblivion.

Much of my work so far has been largely focused on my home environment; I have made a few pieces that are to do with my relationship to my home and my bedroom which have thematically influenced my work. However, on a more practical note, I have learned to adapt my practice to the restrictions of working from home and not in a dedicated studio space for art making. Most of my work this semester has been me just trying all I can to find ways of making art in my bedroom and my studio, living space, and sleeping space have all morphed into one. Next week, I am moving back to halls and therefore I will be able to use the art studio again which is a really exciting prospect. Hopefully, I can have access to a private room wherein I can turn the lights off and explore my projection mapping work further in a room with no obstructions, unlike the space I have been working in for the last few months.

Having access to a new space will hopefully allow me to generate some fresh ideas, as well as re-explore old ones in perhaps a more practical setting. As for ideas I am interested in revisiting, I think I want to try out some of my Francesca Woodman photography work and perhaps taking the style of them and translating them into animation. Having a room in the studio means that I will have a more minimal environment which means that more focus will be on the body rather than the room around it, which is an interesting progression to the project.

Going forward, I am excited to see how my practice will develop in a more practical space. I feel that my work will evolve both thematically and physically into something bigger and even more meaningful. I have done some research on some installation artists, such as Yayoi Kusama and Tatsuo Miyajima, who are inspiring me to push my use of space, light, and reflective surfaces even further. My main goal in the coming weeks is to have fun and try and expand my practice to a larger space and see what ideas can come from that, continuing with the mediums of projection, installation, video, and photography.

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