I don’t want to come across as a mega feminist because I’m not and as much as I can see all of this in the beauty industry at the same time I still want the flawless skin, would love a Prada handbag and envy the beautiful models too.
I don’t want my work to be a serious assault on the fashion world but more of a subversion of imagery to change the audiences perception of the original. Although I think some of my collages have a slightly more serious feel, I also think that some are a tongue in cheek look at the fashion industry.
I like to rearrange images, the fashion and celebrity world often takes itself very seriously and I want to make it a bit more lighthearted. Many of the ideas used in photoshoots are utterly ridiculous but taken extremely seriously by the industry and by appropriating the imagery to make a new scene and put a bit of that ridiculousness back.
During level 5 I started working mainly with collage and paint, moving on from music influenced work, I began focusing on the beauty and glamour side of the media.
I liked to take the majority of my imagery from glamour and fashion magazines. The photoshop perfect bodies and faces have always amazed me. As a teenager I was a tomboy and Vogue or the like would have been the last magazine I picked up and I had my head stuck in Q or NME most the time perving at the newest indie band.
Looking at the models and ideals in the fashion and celebrity magazines I could see how young girls could easily be influenced into thinking that this is how they should look and that if they didn’t, that there was something wrong with them.
Also the lack of any identity with the models, apart from the odd one, all their faces easily blended into indistinguishable clones. I use the eyes from the models and also the eyeless faces as to me, a lot of our soul and individuality is in the eyes. By removing and rearranging the eyes it gives a more sinister feel, which I feel is impacted by using the monoprint backgrounds I had made.
I experimented with collage during our lens based media sessions during level 4 but mostly in my sketchbook as a way to express the source materials and imagery that had caught my eye. I developed this further in level 5, creating collages from magazine images and looking at identity as a theme.
Images from
Yellow Submarine (1968),
Grateful Dead, Aoxomoxoa (1969)
Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974)
My installation was influenced at the start purely by music and then developed into looking at the whole of the 1960s culture, music, celebrity, comic, films and literature.
This got my brain firing off on all different tangents after realising I could have source material from as many different influences as I liked and, like a plant starting to grow shoots growing towards the light, I slowly felt like realisation was dawning on me but i hadn’t yet worked out quite what that realisation was yet.
In my first year at university I explored a number of techniques, a range of printmaking methods, painting, the use of found objects and how displaying my work as an installation could change the way it was received by the audience.
To me it was all about experimenting and trying out all the techniques that were available to me that I had never been able to do before. Also it was about breaking my preconceptions of what fine art could be, anything could be art not just a painted masterpiece or a photorealistic sketch and that there was more ways of creating art than the traditional methods that had been ingrained into my brain.
I felt I quickly developed my own individual style and began to feel more comfortable creating work that I felt happy with whether it conformed to other people’s ideals or not. It was beneficial to me to build up my confidence and push my work forward so I could develop both as an artist and personally.
