Thinking about the repetitiveness of my daily routine and other items to collect. I have began to collect my used cotton wool balls which I use after cleansing my face.
With the cotton wall balls I am beginning to collect, I decided that I wanted to do something with them such as attaching them together, to become a piece as a whole. I decided on stitching them together with gaps as I didn’t want it just to look like one massive piece of cotton wool. I wanted the viewer to be able to see each individual ball showing a story of that morning or evening. This reminded me of Alexandra Bircken’s work again with her use of stitching the same material together representing different parts and is something my work keeps leaning towards.
Perhaps these cotton wool balls are abject enough to work just on their own. Perhaps they don’t necessarily need to be attached together. Or maybe they do just on a larger scale? I need to play around with the arrangement of these I think, as I feel they could work well due to the remains of the skin like the wipes being left on them. There is something really quite interesting about them. I just need to find the best way of displaying themto really give the abject feeling to the viewer that I want to give. Especially if I were to use them in my degree show. The arrangement and display would be a very important part.
I feel I am enjoying my work more due to the abject content my work is having, and this is something that fascinates me within art. How we can as humans get so shocked at something slightly out of the ordinary and put up these barriers of disgust, not wanting to go near or interact with the piece through something slightly abject? I feel my work is abject but it’s subtly abject. It doesn’t shout at you in the face it’s abject, it draws you in closer through your curiosity before shocking you with what it is, then provoking reactions from the viewer. I don’t want to hide this abjectness but at the same time I don’t think it has to be overly shocking to create a disgusted response. Such as a few hairs on a piece of cheese can provoke all that response for something quite small and discrete.
Many of my friends have commented about how disgusting it is to use used make-up wipes and to create something out of them. However they all put this mask of make-up on in the morning and remove it in the evening the same as me with a wipe. What is it that makes it so abject? Is it the thought of someone elses skin which has been rubbed on this wipe? Or is it just because they are waste material that should be discarded at the end of the day? They all do this, it’s just I have used them to make something from. No-one is disgusted in the morning when putting on all these layers of products. It is just when the face is removed and the traces of make-up are left on the wipe that it suddenly become so disgusting, it seems.
I feel this does reflect our modern day society with how much we are reminded to recycle. There is this whole mass production in society where items are made in their thousands, shipped all over the world, but once finished with they are discarded or recycled. Will one day recycling come to the extreme that we have to reuse old face wipes? I doubt it very much, but I feel this does portray modern society in a way. It is not really the area I am looking at within my work but it does relate a lot I feel. So much stuff is recycled now. We do not know what was on that piece of paper before it was recycled; as it now looks new. I think a lot of it is to do with the visual impact of the object with viewer. You have to see it to believe it perhaps, or have to want to believe it?
I feel like I am slightly going off trail but it does remind me of the piece by Piero Manzoni called ‘Artist’s Shit’, unless we see it do we believe it is there? I feel this is an interesting approach to art, how does the viewer know to trust the artist? I want to confront the viewer with my work. I want them to have to come closer to my work curious as to what it is, then to find it is old make-up or that its my strands of knotted hair. I don’t want them to question it I want it to stare them in the face once they realise. But I feel this subtly is also needed and is very important with my work to be able to draw them in slowly. They probably will question why I have done it but I don’t want them to question whether it actually is real hair for example, I am hoping they realise it is.
As weird as it may be I am actually really enjoying collecting these items from me, displaying them and making pieces of work from them as well as them being work in their own right. I think I have finally found my real area of interest within collecting. I have skirted around the surface of collecting for a while with collections and it has took me some good time to figure out what I am really interested in within this area. It all fascinates me and I enjoy delving into various areas of it but this auto-biographical collecting is where I feel I am really finding myself.
I feel like it has made me open up more with my art and how I am expressing myself through my art. For myself being filmed removing my make-up in front of a camera felt like a big step for me and my work. Very few people have seen me without my make-up on due to the fact I am very self-concious without it. In a way it taught me actually how self conscious I really am. Hoping no one would come round to my space while I didn’t have it on, hoping I could nip to the bathroom without anyone seeing me…
I keep thinking if I didn’t have all these routines in the morning I would be ready far quicker, I could do something more in my day or have longer in bed before I would need to begin getting ready. However no matter what though I will always be up in plenty of time to cover myself in this mask before I step outside. It is such a tedious routine yet I do it every day. I feel this is an interesting part of me and I feel I could explore it more I just don’t know what I’m looking at doing at the moment with it. Or maybe I am just confused at myself. Why do I do this to myself?
As my collections have become a lot more personal to me and more to do with the daily routines and repetitiveness that goes through my day. Wake up, shower, eat, make-up, get dressed etc etc. I am thinking about doing another film piece to show this repetitiveness. Not sure what yet doing and how, but I will have a think.
Now my toiletry bottles are painted white, I decided that I would place them in my cabinet again to see how they worked. the effect of them in the cabinet is far more effect now everything is consistently white. If I were focusing more on mass production and recycling, I feel these could be a strong potential to work with. However as my work has becomea lot more personal they are becoming more and more irrelevant. I will try some more experiments with display perhaps, just to see if ideas change, but I may just have to leave them alone soon due to lack of personal relevance with me.
Also as you can see from the photographs my spray painting isn’t too great…
I have been collecting my eyelashes for quite some weeks now, however due to the minuscule size of them I haven’t really done anything with them except store them in a little plastic pot. As my other personal work has been working really well for me, I wanted to do something with these eyelashes but how?
I ended up buying a polystyrene head off of Ebay and decided I would try using them in they way eyelashes are used on your eyes. I coated them all in mascara to make them darker so they would stand out more. I bought some superglue and began the fiddly task of gluing them on this head. It did take quite some time due to how fiddly it was, however it did produce quite a nice effect. For it to be more effective I need to collect more as they are a bit sparse at the moment.
I do like the look of the eyelashes on the head as it displays them clearer to the viewer as eyelashes naturally are. However I’m not sure if they now look ‘too nice’. Whether when people know they are my own eyelashes it would creep them out, or whether they were better in the pot when they were just discarded eyelashes in a bundle? For now I’ll leave them be on the head, but I’m not sure about them.
