My artist career started not as a ‘true’ artist as one would call it, but rather, as an online one.
As a cartoonist by commission for five years, I learnt the tools to draw with a graphics tablet and pen before I moved myself into the realm of ‘physical art’, the kind that involved movement and mistakes that could not be righted with just the click of the button.
It was a great exploration; it was me on a journey to discover something about myself… that if I put my mind to it, I could craft out of things that others would easily look over. I could take junk and make treasure. This is what I did; the moment I thought of the project named ‘Home’ I knew I was going to throw caution to the wind and go back to what I had did in my first year of studying… let go of the restraint and comfort I had been enveloped in and do something different, something personal.
And thus, ‘Home‘ was created.
I’ve evolved. I know now that art is something more than just looking good; I’ve learnt that you can create minimal pictures with meaning that can stun art critics everywhere. I’ve learnt I have a talent for the 3D, that its good to explore, that I don’t have to be afraid of making mistakes. That making a mess can be good, and as long as you have feeling, even the smallest piece can have impact.
I never used to think like this… but I’m glad I do now. From here, I only want to continue to create and get better and better; I want to explore 3D more and more and one day get my installations into one of the big art museums. Its been emotional… but I wouldn’t ever want to lose these memories.
Into the world I go with a lot of experience under my belt now…!
La Bouche by Hans Bellmer was another interesting piece to look at because one of my pieces was also a chair and was also mostly made of a dismembered body. I had constructed the chair with just a head atop it covered in fur. It lacked eyes like Bellmer’s work and it was uncanny in the way that it had human teeth, and its ‘legs’ were lurching as if it had fused to the chair. This is perhaps one of my favourite pieces.
My work as a whole differs a ton from my paintings work in a manner of ways, though one thing is consistent between them; theres a violence about them.
Both my paintings and physical work have both uncanny elements as well as a violence and horror to them that is just sort of a part of the way I create, and I have always been like this; my digital work is exactly the same.
Ive always been a fan of the bizarre, and writing my dissertation on a subject I really enjoyed as well as using it in my practise and as well as using my own interests meant that my time at University, if anything, has been enjoyable and has been a lesson; I now know my strengths and weaknesses, what I’m good at and what I’m not.
‘Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected with childhood life. We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people.’ (Freud, 1919, p.233)
My ‘doll’ was a reflection on childhood life and appealed to the uncanny due to the way it was lacking a head, stuffed, had no real gaze (much like Pauline bunny) and yet still was a ‘person’. It was easily seen as a child and it was positioned to face the walk way. Around it girly things were strewn to gender it and it was lacking hands and feet; it was connected to MY childhood life as they were MY childhood pyjamas it was wearing… along with my childhood keyboard it was beside.
I was never fond of dolls when I was little, but now I have a bigger interest in them due to understanding the uncanny now, ironically.
(See here; Lucas’s Pauline Bunny.)
Jake and Dinos Chapmans work, Great Deeds Against The Dead, was the piece I was looking at before I chose the final pieces for my dissertation as I was looking at dolls and the human form. This work appealed to me because of the lack of limbs (as well as the decapitated head which I used in my work upon a chair!) and because of the religious symbolism upon it (the man crucified).
