There’s No Place like Home

The film The Wizard of Oz is again my inspiration for my latest work Dorothy in the Deadly Poppy Field.  The poppy is a distinctive red flower which is immediately recognisable. It is a symbol of remembrance of the sacrifice of soldiers’ lives given on the battlefield. It is also a flower associated with narcotics.

Preliminary drawing

Applying watercolour over the ink wash

I gave the paper a wash of red ink but the colour looked pink. I thought I would try watercolour as this would create the delicate fluidity of the flower petals and also I could mix the exact hue I had planned. I had not used watercolours in a long time and was pleasantly surprised by the intense colour I achieved when painting the poppies.

Dorothy in the Deadly Poppy Field

Detail showing the fly on Dorothy’s hand

The poppies are a poignant symbol of death and create a feeling of unease when seen with a body.  Dorothy’s pose and features are human, yet she could be mistaken for a doll. I have purposely drawn her doll like to add to the feeling of the uncanny I am trying to create. This link to the animate and inanimate crosses the boundaries between life and death. The inclusion of a fly is a symbol that she is either a victim or a perpetrator.  I want the viewer to have something to think about and fill in the gaps to the story.

Writing this blog has been an extremely useful process, enabling me to look at my themes and ideas and see how they connect. I have found writing down my thoughts has allowed me to develop my concepts and to also see my strengths and weaknesses as an emerging artist.

Reading through my blog I realise the importance of photographs and images in my work. Working with photographs in Photoshop allows me to distort and manipulate the image to create something that I can work with or that can stand alone as a piece of artwork. This has developed further with the inclusion of video in my work.

Exhibitions are a continuing part of my research. Silent Partners, Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime and The Image as Burden at Tate Modern all have enriched my creativity by sparking new ideas. Books and films have always been important to my creativity. Often my imagination goes into overdrive when I see something in a film or read a book.

In the opening chapter of my dissertation I talked about the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz. The tornado uproots Dorothy home and she is transported to Oz. However, Oz is Dorothy’s home, she never left her home. Home should be a safe place but Dorothy’s home becomes a terrifying place full of secrets and hidden emotions. Her home becomes unhomely – uncanny.

This feeling of the uncanny is something I have tried to capture in my work.  I made a mugshot of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz because she is a killer. Even if you disagree with me and think her killing of the witch in the film was an act of self-defence, the inclusion of a young girl from a family film with my other images should add to that feeling of unease causing discussion and debate about my work.  My Homesick film and digital images show the instability and madness of Dorothy’s mind. With the Homesick film, I used intense colour along with a mix of moving and still images. I added to these visual effects to the sound of the tornado and the cackle of the witch’s laughter, which for the viewer I hope will be a disturbing encounter with the uncanny. Projecting the film in the dark space added to the charged mood of the film, but it would have been good to get other people’s views to know how watching Homesick in the darkness made them feel. I would like to take this further by making another short film using my mugshots and the interior shots of the Bates’ Hotel in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to create an eerie atmospheric film.

Identity and metamorphosis are themes I have explored through the notion of change, both physically or emotionally. More recently with the mugshots, I have been trying to make the viewer uncomfortable with a deeper, more disturbing reveal of the women’s personalities I am depicting. These women could be innately evil or victims of unfortunate circumstances, but at some point there will have be a change in their personalities, making them transform from the people they once were into rejected members of society (symbolically as an insect metamorphoses into a completely new form as it changes from an immature form to an adult).  My mugshots allow the viewer to become a witness to women who are scared, distressed or look cruel and cold. I want these portraits to be an intimate exposure of hidden emotions to create psychologically charged work.

My mugshots are beginning to evolve with the inclusion of flies, which are a link to death and crime. I am also thinking of creating portraits on a much larger scale. If I put the mugshot women into a murky domestic setting and add clues to a dark identity and the crime they have committed, I could create unnerving uncanny works. This feels like just the beginning of a project I could and will take much further as I head towards my degree show next year.

A link to people and their homes would be a mix of the home and the unhomely. This again brings me back to my dissertation on the uncanny, and the application of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to explain how it can create an emotional response of fear and anxiety. Freud discusses the uncanny in relation to the mother, where the female genitals are the definitive familiar object on the maternal body. He describes how the small boy who has always identified with his mother when seeing his mother has no penis becomes anxious and fearful of losing his own male sex organ (castration anxiety). In modern society, the home is the substitute for the mother, the thing that we are all very well-acquainted with.  It is the place of safety for an individual, somewhere which protects each of us from threat and danger, as does the mother’s body. Freud extends his theory to the home and the familiar, referring to the mother’s womb as “man’s old ‘home’, the place where everyone once lived” (Freud, 1919, p.124). Just as the discovery of the mother’s perceived castration is a signal that the safety of the individual is threatened, causing anxiety, unfamiliar observations and experiences of the home can cause equally strong anxieties or fears.

A mix of women with unsettling emotional expressions in a domestic space would be disturbing for the viewer. The familiar interiors of the images could contain possessions of the criminal or victim depicted or perhaps I could include something you would not associate with the home. These are all ideas I will take forward for my degree show work. This juxtaposition of something strange and familiar would play upon the viewer’s deepest darkest fears. The home, the perpetrator and echoes of the victims, would expose the realisation that it is not a safe place.

To experience the uncanny, there’s no place like home.

I displayed my mugshots in the seminar space to see how they work as a group. By showing the portraits together I wanted to intensify the feeling of anxiety. The women I have portrayed seem to connect as they all expose personal private dramas with their expressions. Dorothy may seem different because she is fictional, but the strange beauty of the 1920s mugshots makes the images theatrical. These women are dressed in finery more suitable for an evening out, than a prison cell. My work is about storytelling – I am telling tales in pictures with an assortment of imagined characters.

I wish I could have made more ink drawings as a larger group of portraits would make more impact, but this is something I can still work on. Perhaps I will bring the nurse portraits into this set of work, I’m not sure yet.  The Easter break will be a good time to stop and think about how I want to progress.

My tutor suggested I research Physiognomy. Physiognomy is looking at the physical characteristics of a person’s face or body to make a judgement about their character. This could be really interesting to research as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and others have used physiognomic descriptions when writing about an individual’s persona in their books.

Photographs of the mugshots displayed at university.

Here is a short film I recorded on my mobile phone of the display of mugshots.

After the many months of writing my dissertation I thought I deserved a treat, so I bought myself the Marlene Dumas book The Image as Burden. This was a few months ago before the accompanying exhibition at Tate Modern in London. It is an excellent book but I knew printed pictures on white pages could not compare to seeing the work up close.

After a trek around London first stop at Tate Modern was the café. I sat down at a table with my daughter when a man and woman walked in. The woman had a mass of blond messy hair. She wore two black scarves around her neck which were adorned with a large pink expensive looking brooch in a leaf shape. This lady definitely did not blend into the crowd. She looked around the café and caught my eye. I looked at my daughter and said ‘that really looks like Marlene Dumas’. I knew what she looked like as I had recently watched videos on Youtube of her talking about her work and demonstrating her painting technique.  I quickly googled a picture of Dumas and asked my daughter her opinion. ‘It’s her’ my daughter said. Was it her? If I had gone and stood by this lady and listened to her accent (Dumas is South African) I would have known for sure. I like a mystery and if the lady hadn’t been Dumas I would have been a little disappointed, so let’s say the lady in the café at Tate Modern was Marlene Dumas. Perhaps she was taking a friend to have a personal tour of her exhibition or maybe she wanted to slip into the exhibition and secretly listen to what people were saying about her work.

Marlene Dumas. (2008) For Whom the Bell Tolls  [oil on canvas]

Dumas is an artist who paints from photographs. She uses the familiarity of the face and turns it into something terrifying. Her portraits can be beautiful but it’s a strange unnerving beauty. She unmasks vulnerability, aggression, love and sexuality with fluent, translucent brush strokes. Duma says of her work ‘my people were all shot by a camera, framed, before I painted them. They didn’t know that I’d do this to them. They didn’t know by what names I’d call them…[…] My best works are erotic displays of mental confusions (with intrusions of irrelevant information). (Marlene Dumas, 1985, p.41).

Marlene Dumas. (1994 – ongoing) Rejects [ink, acrylic paint and chalk on paper] 60 x 50 cm each

The exhibition is filled with faces, sometimes on their own or in group portraits. She challenges the way we read expressions or meet a gaze. I became lost in studying the subjects in her ink drawings which are show as a group of portraits. I wondered why they have been grouped together, what was their story, their connection? The title she has given to this work is intriguing and is an indication of who I am looking at. Rejects – that title says so much. A set nine portraits are displayed as a group. These are a powerful set of ink drawings of faces. Some have been distorted by being scratched and cut to reveal an underneath layer. It’s troubling to think what these people have been through to look so mentally damaged.

Part of the fascination with Dumas’ work is you can interpret it in so many ways. She uses codes, visual clues and language are all equally important to her.  Even the title of the show, The Image as Burden has multiple connotations.  Dumas says of her work, ‘there is the image (source photography) you start with the image (the painted image) you end up with, and they are not the same. I want to give more attention to what the painting does to the image, not only to what the image does to the painting’ (Marlene Dumas, 2014, p.7).

Marlene Dumas. (1994) The Painter [oil on canvas] 200 cm x 100 cm

The Painter depicts a naked little girl with blood stained hands and a menacing stare. This haunting image is a mixture of horror and innocence. I couldn’t help but notice the expressive lines Dumas has made on the outline of the child’s face and body.

The Image as Burden is a large exhibition with Dumas’ work filling 14 rooms but well worth seeing if you are in London. She reveals and conceals the damage life has inflicted on these people portrayed in her work and this is a reason why her art has had such an impact on me as an artist.

The crime writer Val Mcdermid describes the first documented example of forensic entomology in her book  Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime.  The Washing Away of Wrongs published in 1247 was a handbook for coroners and the first time insect biology had been used to help solve a crime. Here is an extract from Mcdermid’s book:

‘The victim had been stabbed to death by a roadside. The coroner examined the slashes on the man’s body, then tested an assortment of blades on a cows carcass. He concluded the murder weapon was a sickle. But knowing what caused the wounds was a long way from identifying whose hands had wielded the blade. So the coroner turned to possible motives. The victim’s possessions were still intact, which ruled out robbery. According to his widow, he had no enemies. The best lead was the revelation that the victim hadn’t be able to satisfy a man who had recently demanded the repayment of a debt.

The coroner accused the money lender, who denied the murder was anything to do with him. But the coroner was as tenacious as any TV detective. He ordered all seventy adults in the neighbourhood to stand in a line, their sickles at their feet. There were no visible traces of blood. But within seconds a fly landed enthusiastically on the moneylender’s blade, attracted to the minute traces of blood. A second fly followed, then another. When confronted again by the coroner, the money lender ‘knocked his head on the floor’ and gave a full confession. He’d tried to clean his blade, but his attempt to conceal his crime had been foiled by the insect informers humming quietly at his feet’. (Val McDermid, 2014, p. 43 – 44)

I stretched the paper for this ink drawing so there was no warping. I rather like the watermarks on the image.  These are from small pools of water which lay on the surface of the paper as it was drying. This time I have included flies and bloody red specks in the mugshot to allude to the crime this woman has committed. I have tried not to make the insects too obvious. I want the viewer to be drawn in to the image and then start to think about why a woman would have flies and blood on her clothing.

Sarah Bale (2015) Insect Informer [Ink and chalk on paper]

Detail showing insect

‘the insect kingdom helps the dead victims to provide unwitting but convincing evidence against their killers’. (Val McDermid, 2014, p. 45)