I have been keeping all of the faces I had used the eyes from for my pieces from last year. These have been cut out a bit more delicately than the ones I have been doing recently, but I find the women without eyes quite interesting and quite imposing to look at.
It’s like they have had their identities stolen, eyes are part of what make you who you are. It’s the part of a person you look at to determine trust and honesty, when you’re a child you get told by your mother to look her straight in the eye and tell her the truth and that’s how she’d know you had lied.
By taking away the eyes it adds doubt, fear and a sense of unease. It’s not easy to read someone without being able to see someone’s full expression, like trying to judge someone’s response when they are wearing large sunglasses or have their face turned away from you.
I decided to collage the dolls house in eyes, I have had a fascination with eyes for years. My first year project looking at psychedelia used prints and paintings of eyes, as well as seeing many of the artists at that time had used illustrations of eyes as well, such as Rick Griffin and Robert Crumb.
I want to use eyes because of my feelings about image and how women inparticular are judged and scrutinised for what they look like. By using the eyes from the models and celebrities, who are the ones showing us what we should be wearing and how we should look, but at the same time are the ones who are judged the most by the media and the rest of the world.
It takes three steps to do the collaging, first of all I go through the magazines and cut out the eyes in chunks not as individual eyes. This leaves me with interesting cut outs that when laid over each other can make quite unique images themselves.
The second step is cutting out the eyeballs from the chunks I’ve taken from the magazines. This leaves what looks like mask like shapes that I can’t bring myself to through away as I feel they will come in useful for another piece of work. The third step is actually gluing the, into the house which is painstaking, time consuming and quite awkward. I have got a small amount done and hope that the end result is a bit more impressive than it is at the moment.
This is a mixed media collage on canvas. The face is one of the leftovers after I had used the eyes out of it for another collage last year. I have becoming more and more obsessed with the images left behind after I have used pieces of them for collage.
I have used metallic oil bars and roughly dragged over the canvas so it shows the texture of the canvas. Also I used a texture gel with a gold metallic acrylic paint to go round the edge of the canvas to create a frame effect, like gilt effect on old frames. This is not visible in this photograph. There is also a streak of metallic nail varnish to add to the types of media I had used on this image.
I liked this particular left over image because of the scarf round her neck made her almost look like she was being strangled now that her eyes and mouth were missing.
I used the dried acrylic paint that I left on the paper from my stay wet pallette to attach to the space where the eyes and mouth had been. The texture of this gave an interesting effect, making it appear that it was oozing from the space where her eyes and mouth should have been.
This made me think of everything I thought about the fashion world and this substance oozing from her missing features being the nonsense and lies spoken by and seen by those included in the media.
Before I gave the dolls house a thorough clean, I thought I’d take a few photographs of the inside, while it looked like a miniature derelict house. It was a bit of an experiment with scale, to see what tricks the camera could play on the eye.
Leaving intact all the spiderwebs and decaying wallpaper and putting the dolls house in my garden so all that could be seen through the glass, I found the results of the photographs quite realistic and without anything of real size in the image to go by, it could easily be a life size building.
Having the grass in the background helped with the illusion of size and made the images remind me of an abandoned house in the woods I used to play in as a child. Also bringing back the slightly scared feeling of being alone in that house in the middle of the woods, the way that buildings like that are associated with creepiness from Halloween stories and dares, to scenes from horror films like Blair Witch Project.
I’m pleased with the effectiveness of these images and once I have cleaned and collaged the whole house, I will take some more photographs to play with the scale then as well.
After deciding I would never be able to collage my actual home I began thinking about making a mini environment. My first ideas were to create it in a shoe box or making an enclosed environment, but then I was very luckily offered an old dolls house by a friend.
These are the photographs of the house on the day that I got it, it’s quite an imposing house, run down and dark in colour giving it a slightly macabre feel to it. This was perfect for me as I love the creepy feel to it and old fashioned look, the wood inside has deteriorated a bit and the windows are grubby and cracked. I won’t be making a Merz house or a 3d collage, just collaging a found object, making a house of images.
