My Final Year of Uni

My brother (who the project is based on) is an apprentice farrier, so he had a load of horse shoes that he made in the forge and so I asked if I could have them to use for my project. Horse shoes are related to luck, a symbol of luck, and before his holiday to laganas, zante he had tattooed ‘luck is for the weak’ with two horseshoes on the back of his legs, because he said he doesn’t believe in luck he believes in hard work. After what happened In Zante he told me that when he was in hospital he thought about getting the tattoos covered up, because he said he was ‘one lucky bastard’ and if it wasn’t for luck he wouldn’t be here. Then he carried on and said to me, but then I realised, ‘luck is for the weak, and in my time of weakness luck saved me’ that weekend was very unlucky for Taylor to end up in the situation he did, however he had so much luck in the way that he found his rep on the street after it happened and she wouldn’t normally be there but it just so happened that this night she walked down there and she was able to help Taylor get to the emergency medical centre, then also we had a lot of luck with flights etc, and getting him home and everything. I think what really made us realise how lucky he was was when we were in Addenbrookes hospital and we were speaking to a woman whose husband was beaten in Norwich by a gang and was left deaf, had brain damage and was unable to carry on working or even carry on with his normal life.

So basically luck had a big part in this story of what happened to my brother and I wanted to somehow include that quote that he said to me ‘Luck is for the weAk, and in my time of weakness luck saved me’ so I thought about creating a print with horseshoes, then include the text with it.

I created this prints by inking up the horse shoe with block printing ink, and then pressing the paper onto the shoe. This creased the paper slightly, but worked better then pressing the horseshoe onto the paper, because when pressing the shoe onto the paper it didn’t pick up all of the groves and details, whereas by pressing the paper into the shoe it picked up more details and looked more like a horse shoe.

These were just a practise, now I want to print onto some big sheets of card and include the text somehow. I also thought of having some of the horse shoes upside down and some upright to represent good luck and bad luck.
For my final installation piece I might even just use the actual horse shoes.

I have decided to create a face cast of my brother. Here are photos of me applying the plaster bandage to his face. I now have the plaster bandage cast, so all that is left for me to do is fill it with plaster once it is dry. I am also going to put a loop of wire in the back of the mask so that I am able to hang it when it is finished.
The purpose for making the face cast is that I aim to create a video piece, where my brother (Taylor) will use an iron bar to hit the face cast which will smash it into pieces, then he will pick up the pieces from the floor one by one and try to put it back together. We are using an iron bar because this is what the Serbian men used on Taylor when they hit him in the face.
This is a sort of representation of what happened, how he was broken and he had to try put the pieces of himself back together, back to how he was, and even when the pieces are all back in place, the cracks still remain. Meaning that although he is healed there will always be the traumatic scarring in his mind, he will never forget it.
It is also saying how we may heal and get over certain events in our life but we are never completely the same after, things change us in life and we have to accept the cracks as a part of who we are.

Also, the fact that he is smashing his own face cast shows his anger in some ways, and represents how low he felt about himself, how he said that he felt like a failure, it shows him destructing his self confidence.

I am hoping to create this video the week commencing 11th April, as this is the week my brother has off of work so I will be able to take him into uni and hopefully use one of the spaces there to film it.

The thing with this video piece is that it has to be done right the first time because there is only one face cast.

After filming this video, I was thinking of gluing the face cast back together and then displaying it alongside the video for my degree show.

When I went to the Venice Biennale in November 2015, there were many different videos displayed in a variety of different ways, there were multiple screen projections staggered around a room, there were two, three and four screen projections side by side, there were projections accompanied by objects, or sculptures, and the pieces that I really thought worked well were the ones where you sat down and put the headphones on to listen to the video, this makes you really focus on the video. What I also thought was effective were the videos displayed on small screens, because you are drawn in to get up close to the screen. But what I also found was that the large projections with loud sounds in the black rooms were very effective in the sense that they are quite overpowering, and the loud sounds tend to draw people in to have a look at the video. I would like to try both the small screens with and without headphone and the large, loud projections but for different pieces, for example the headphone idea will be used for displaying the video of my brother talking.
The reason I want to try the headphone idea as well is that I have never done it before, I Usually either display a projection or a monitor with the sound quite loud.

This is an example of the use of head phones, This was in the Spanish Pavillion. I like the use of benches and multiple screens, because although everyone else can see it, only the person with the headphones on can hear and understand i properly.

Above are a few examples from various artists of different multiple screen projections or screens. I really like the one that you could walk around and in-between, was visually very exciting, when you walked to the middle you were surrounded which I liked.

These two pieces above are both pieces which involve an object and a video which are somewhat related to each other. The one with the tv monitor on the floor and the piece of material next to it was the one which interested me the most. The material was the outcome, and the video showed the process in which the marks were made on the material. This is something that I have similarly done in the past when i created prints from punching card, and skipping in card, then displaying a video of me punching and skipping next to the the prints. The only difference is that I didn’t actually video the process of me creating the prints and display it, which i wished i had done. This is definitely something I aim to do in the future.

Other Works which I found interesting, but aren’t video related…

I loved this piece of work^ because there were different words written separately all over the wall, and I found myself walking around this one for ages reading the different words. What also made this interesting is that the words had been printed on the wall with giant wooden stamps that were displayed on stands in front of the prints, it was interesting to look at the words on the stamps because they were obviously written backwards, and they were so big and positioned in different ways so was good to walk around them.

^This room was full of different old clocks on the surrounding walls, then in the middle of the room were cabinets filled with different old bits, but the bit that was the most interesting for me was that right in the centre inside the cabinets was a spaces that you could walk round in with these dark green ghost-like hanging pieces made from old army clothes, they seemed to resemble the human form but were ragged and just hung there by fishing wire so you could wall around and in-between them, the room had this dark dull feeling to it, with black walls and low lighting.

^ I liked this piece purely because of its beauty. It was a large room full of old keys that were hung from the ceiling with red string at different lengths and scattered around and on old boats. I really love old keys and have a few at home that i have collected, they are all really different and i find them so interesting so to walk into a room surrounded by them was just fascinating, especially when you looked up and there was just all this red string hanging down with keys on the end.

^These bricks were made with ‘Never Work’ on them in chinese symbols. There were loads of them all in a room stacked up, and you could pay 10 euros for one to take home. I loved the idea of the bricks ending up travelling all over the world with different people, all ending up in different situations. (I did buy one, but it got confiscated by security at the airport, because i put it in my hand luggage and they said they classed it as a weapon! so i watched as they threw it in a bin. I was very gutted)

The idea I have for displaying the video of my brother is to have it on a monitor with a set of headphones that the viewer can put on and sit and listen to it. I want the viewer to display it like this because it is a very personal thing that he is sharing, therefor I wanted it to be a more intimate thing rather then displaying it on a projection with the sound really loud. This way they will really focus and listen to him more, the viewer will connect to it more and then hopefully the emotion will be felt.

I got the idea for displaying it in this way from Tracey Emin’s piece of work titled ‘A Conversation With My Mum’. (pictured above) In this piece she video’s her and her mum have a conversation where Emin asks her mum very personal questions. She displayed the video on a small monitor on a small table top- like stand, with two sets of headphones and two wooden chairs (a bit like dinning table chairs) for the viewers to sit on and watch the video. I have always like this idea, that the people watching the video really are forced to engaged with it, and also I think it is interesting how the viewers are almost sitting in a similar situation to Emin and her mum who are on the video, and sitting on household chairs which also relates to the feeling of a home, an inviting environment.

I created a video of my brother, Taylor talking to the camera about what happened in Zante. I filmed him at our home to make him feel comfortable, and then set the camera up on a tripod and left the room while he talked about it. There were three separate videos of him, but I have now edited them and put them together so it is just one video. I am very pleased with the video and how it came out, it is very emotional for me hearing him talk about it even though I’ve already heard all about it before. It was a very hard thing for him to do, and his emotion really comes across in the video, the reason why there is three separate videos is because he had to stop twice because he got emotional and said he didn’t want to cry on camera. There is a particular bit of the event that he didn’t really go into much detail about, and that is the moment when he was hiding up a tree after being beaten with a pole, and he couldn’t see out of one of his eyes. This was the most traumatic part for him, because he thought that the men were going to find him and hurt him again, he has had reoccurring nightmares about it, and was the reason he couldn’t sleep properly for months. He has talked to me about everything that happened and how he felt, but he finds it’s very difficult to talk on video about it. The most memorable thing that he has ever told me about that night was how got out of the tree and was running towards the main street and he fell down a hill, and he said at that moment he thought to him self I’m not going to make it, I’m going to die.

The aim of this video is that the person watching it feels the emotion, and that there is a sort of understanding of the emotional trauma that he went through.

He talks on the video about how he felt really angry after for a long while, and still does now, this is something that I want to portray in another piece of work, but I am not sure on how to do this yet. I also want to have a piece of work to show how broken and helpless he felt in this whole situation.

What I also still want to do is video me, my mum and my dad talking about our experience of the whole thing because equally we felt helpless in the sense that we were in England and there was nothing we could do.