some images of my project hung up in the studio.
looking at the other side of the fabric - drawn on side
the patches of fabric before I stitched them together
Showing posts with label body project. Show all posts
Showing posts with label body project. Show all posts
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
one and other
Anthony Gormley's project "One and Other" for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square this summer.
For 100 days, every hour (applicants chosen randomly though also representational of the geographic of UK) a different person will stand on the plinth creating a "monument built in time out of 1 hours of people's lives".
Sunday, 1 March 2009
skin/clothes/marks etc
list of links and notes:
Human skin is the largest organ of the integumentary system made up of multiple layers of epithelial tissues that guard underlying muscles and organs. As the interface with the surroundings, skin plays the most important role in protecting.
"FACTOIDS:
- As an adult, you may have more than 20 square feet of skin -- about the size of a blanket.
- You are likely to shed some 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime"
wikipedia on skin
clothes- distressed and repaired showing their history etc and current economic climate "make do and mend"
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
anna deavere smith
Anna Deavere Smith
An actress, writer and playwright from Baltimore. She has been doing a project since the late 1970s called "On the Road a Search for American Character". This has involved recording conversations with over 2,000 people which she then re-enacts generally without props or costumes. The aim was to "absorb America". She is able to embody the character regardless of their age, race, gender etc.
I like the idea of using scripts from conversations or interviews and reconsidering them out of their original context. Might experiment with film or sound of Katie and I- identity, compare/contrast, mirror, repeating, expectations etc...
the twin thing
the body as a site of cultural representation
I had a look at The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self Portraiture in the Twentieth Century so that directed a lot of my thoughts towards considering the body as object and objectification of the female body.
I was also reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley which is really interesting in its discussion of a fictitious future society where people are conditioned to fulfill certain roles in society. "Community, identity, stability"
Stemming from ideas around Henry Ford's mass production this society uses the Bokanovsky Process (cloning) to produce "ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines".
me and Katie
The recurring images surrounding twins and identity were particularly relevant to me as an identical twin.
(The Savage's description of scenes at the hospital, pg 185)
"Twin after twin, twin after twin, they came - a nightmare. Their faces, their repeated face - for there was only one between the lot of them -...the ward was maggoty with them. They swarmed between the beds, climbed over, crawled under..."
"High, low, from a multitude of separate throats, only two voices squeaked or growled. Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors."
some of the artists from my research
Jenny Saville
"Ghada Amer was born in Cairo in 1963; she now lives and works in New York. Viewing Amer's hand-embroidered paintings, with their delicate traceries of stray threads, involves a visual shift, as what appears to be a mass of abstract lines gradually comes into focus as highly ero
tic figures, displayed in a repetitive pattern. The work refuses to bow to the puritanical elements of both Western and Islamic culture, and what could be called "institutionalized feminism," with its own persistent myth of feminine virtue."
"queried the notion of a single, knowable femininity and flaunted the artifice of both femininity and representation itself." Art of Reflection, Chapter 3
"I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best."
"The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan, which started in 1990, involved a series of plastic surgeries in the course of which the artist started to morph herself with respect to some of the most well known historical paintings and sculptures. Supported by her Carnal Art manifesto, these works were filmed and broadcast in institutions throughout the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York. Orlan's goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of beauty as suggested by the men who painted women. When the surgeries are completed she will have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Gerome’s Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana from a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Orlan picked these characters, “not for the canons of beauty they represent… but rather on account of the stories associated with them.” Diana because she is inferior to the gods and men but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, she represents; Psyche because of her fragility and vulnerability within the soul; Venus for carnal beauty; Europa for her adventurous outlook to the horizon, the future."
is best known for his live performances, which he began to make in the mid-nineties. He has described these acts as focusing on the visceral “where the body is a canvas and an unmediated site for representation of the sacred, the beautiful, the untouchable, the unspeakable and for the pain, the love, the hate, the loss, the power and the fears of the human condition.”
Karla Solano
Karla Solano
Karla Solano was born in Costa Rica, 1971.
She uses photography, film and installation to explore the body, especially her own as a subject.
Her project "Skin" from 2003 uses close up photography to create the effect of her skin as a landscape. Thinking about skin as more than a protective layer and also as a personal history of her experiences. I like the way she has fragmented the
skin from her body by photographing it so close that you can't really tell what part of her body you are looking at.
In some of her work Solano uses sewing into the skin
which, when shown in film, creates a strange and disturbing image- the contrast between seeing the needle and thread pierce the skin and imagining pain but also being aware of the lack of sensitivity in the upper layers of skin and seeing no blood.
The film "Home" shows Solano stitching an image of a house into the palm of her hand which ends disturbingly with her pulling out the thread. This is made even more eerie by Solano humming all the way through - creating a false sense of normality and domesticity - some of the songs she hums are familiar.
Actions are reminiscent of seemingly contrasting activities of domestic sewing and self-harm, or body modification.
safety pins through the top layers of skin on my hand
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