What a bizarre thing this is; I wanted to experiment with something I had never used before… and this is how this thing came about. I wanted it to be vomiting; I wanted it to be rough and I wanted it to be eerie.. I wouldn’t call it a success as it mostly leaves people questioning what I have done here; but I still rather like it. It was made by binding straw with string over and over (with the help of hot glue). Many people, like the other head piece I have done, seem to think this represents a pig of some sort.
As an artist who plays with furniture, he was someone I was also greatly interested in. Furniture is the staple of the home, and when I saw ‘The Fuco Ueda chair’ I was instantly excited to try and replicate this in some bizarre way first and foremost, but also to try and add on from it. The artist himself had already stated that he wanted it to feel ‘alive’ and that too was the thing I wanted to capture in the way the legs worked. The idea of a chair moving, like it had legs but didn’t, really appealed and inspired me.
Extract from benjaminnordsmark.com;
[ One out of four chairs this one was inspired by the japanese painter Fuco Ueda that have a interesting universe. She is always using japanese schoolgirls in her paintings, and they are often in very strange scenarious. The girls always have red knees and elbows and often wearingblue dresses.
I was very inspired by her works and wanted to build a chair that captured her universe but with my own approach. Therefore I came up the idea to incorporate the girls’ legs into a simple chair and try to make it look like the chair is alive. ]
A Japanese dollmaker, I was highly interested in his work for a number of reasons. Firstly was his interest in the morbid… particularly that of the sexual kind. This kind of art style combined with his obsession of ‘amputations, trauma, and medical probing’ made him an interesting source of inspiration for one of my 3d pieces; a doll strapped to a canvas.
Extract from AkaTako.net;
[ The handmade dolls of Japanese artist Etsuko Miura exhibit amputations, trauma, and medical probing. The frail bodies are coarsely repaired with metal staples and stitches which only highlight their beauty and delicate nature. ]
I desired to show the rawness he did, so I stripped this doll and tied her with black wool, symbolizing black rope, to a bed in a bondage style. I have her hair that was essentially my hair because I wanted her to look more ‘ordinary’. I used stark colours, black against orange, because black is the colour of ‘sex’ and ‘taboo’ but also the colour of no emotion… all its connotations are bad. Orange is a vibrant colour that is easily the opposite, uncommon, bright, and lively, which represents the ‘bed’. I think this worked very well.
This was an experiment to see if I was to be able to make a video at the end of the learning year to show in my space. It was a success. I had many people, without telling them of what I intended to convey, be bang on the spot with my theme of ‘abuse’. Haunting and strange, I looped an old music box I had along with the fan in my room… before suddenly reversing the noise via computer to completely switch the atmosphere around. Throwing in some moving shots, pixalating things, distorting others and adding questionable text designed to be rhetorical more than anything proved to be a very tense experience for many people watching.
Due to my feedback, I decided I would do it again; using my own sources of sounds, taking nothing from others, editing it entirely myself, I would once again put my heart into my film being the only moving thing in my very static room.
Just a few more shots of what I had done when I was experimenting with photography before I switched and decided to film make instead.
