ucs

draft proposal part 2…

With my work after the degree show I plan, on carrying on with the concept and ideas I am currently working on but exploring the concept and materials more. Because of the limited time limit to get work in for the degree show, I haven’t had the chance to explore other avenues that my work could progress down that may take a long period of time, I plan to use the masters to explore these routes and really open up my concept.

I plan to use the same or similar materials I am currently using, but plan to look into using molten sugar to create work under the style of Joseph Marr and to explore the concept of installation work, and x-rays.

I would also like to be able to learn to critically explore my work better to gain a better understanding of my work and concept. I would also like to explore ways of making my work more permanent, for example using photocopier powder and heating it to stick it to glass or Perspex. I would also like to try and make a large scale resin tablet with photograms or a charcoal piece suspended inside, and to make my work on a larger scale.

I think I will continue to observe the human form but maybe start to bring other people in to act as subjects, that have flaws with them and are a different shape to myself, taller, fatter, skinner etc. and properly spend time exploring the diversity of the human figure. Looking at people who were born with defects and looking at people who have defections through consequences within their life and that are brought on through their surroundings.

The other part I would like to explore is human effect on other humans, looking at the way people perceive you and how that affects your moral being, your confidence, and how you perceive yourself. So I would like to make pieces where human intervention is a key element, for example doing charcoal pieces across the whole floor in a room and then allowing people to walk across that floor to view the pieces in turn leaving their mark and foot prints behind them.

Changing and hiding the pieces the more human intervention the piece gets, so that in a way the more you batter someone down by judging them for what the look like and the defects they have, their soul, their spirit turns from a beautiful crisp image to something that is faded, scuffed and dirty. Losing the image, the form, that was once there. But then on the other hand the beautiful image was made from the dark, dirty dust to begin with.

“On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of art.” Camus, A.

“Our house was bombed, but there were lots of bricks. Ruins are wonderful because they are the beginning of something new—you can do something with them.” – Anselm Kiefer

this is my draft proposal i had to do for my interview for my masters but i thought it would be usefull to put on here as it really goes into my work and what my work is about…

Within my work currently I am exploring the human form and our perception of ourselves and each other. I look at flaws with the human body and believe that it is our flaws that make us who we are, that make us individual.

In my work I take the human form and strip away the features, the identity of the subject leaving behind the shadow, the trace of the pure human form. I look at what our bodies are made up out of chemically, striping the human body back to its key chemical elements, carbon, water, calcium, potassium, and copper.

I then use these elements to make my work, a lot of this work is temporary and once the piece is completed it is swept away leaving only traces of the work behind. I love working with charcoal and potassium within my work, as the piece takes on a life of its own. You can only control the work to a curtain degree the rest is out of the artist’s control.

The other thing I love about these materials and process is that within the piece you can almost always see the artist’s marks, the tread of feet, and the scuff within the piece where mistakes were made. There is no way of “correcting” the piece if there is a mistake, as there is within a painting or sculpture, this then relates to my subject matter as we are all born with flaws and mistakes within our makeup that unless hidden or surgically altered we cannot change.

The other material I have started using within my work is resin, which doesn’t directly relate to the human body although it is primarily a petrol based substance which is made from crude oil, which in turn is made from decomposed and fossilised beings.

In contrast the main reason I enjoy working with resin is the transparency of it, not just the fact you can see through I,t but the fact that any mistakes that are made with it is on show, every chip, crack and finger print.

It also serves as a nice metaphor for looking past the surface of the skin and into the heart beneath, I also am interested in the way the light reflects and dances across the surface of the piece and you can create a beautiful contrast between the object inside and the surface.

The last material I am currently using is a type of photography called photograms this process is where you expose an object onto photographic paper rather than a negative. In this process I use a human figure on top of photo paper; This creates a beautiful vague flowing figure in black and white, Where the paper only remains white where it is in contact with the skin. So the result is almost like an x-ray but instead of bones the flesh is the object.

What I love about this process is it fully strips away the human features yet leaves things like the individual hairs and finger prints from the figure. In The work I have been making for the degree show in the last few weeks, I have been focussing on opposites using a skeleton within my work and myself as the other subject, looking at inside / outside concepts and making bones out of resin but filled with calcium, so they are bones but not bones.

last week ive been pretty busy, i had my interview for my masters (and got in!!) done my photogram for one of my final pieces and worked on getting the perfect potassium piece.

so the next few videos are a bit of a quick update and next steps of what i have been working on ….

review of second attempt

First main piece using the medium of charchoal

Iron filling skull

ok im going to start this thing of from the beginning of my second year of uni, which is where my work really started becoming what it is today.

These next couple of posts are going to look at my work so far, i look how people perceive themselves and how we perceive others.

We all look different and act different but each one of us has the same core scientific elements that make up our biological beings.

Most of my work uses elements found within the human body and plays with the imagination of the audience. So far my favourite mediums to work in have been Iron, Copper, Potassium, Lead, Resin, Icing Sugar, Fibre glass and Charcoal.

So as you can see from the above list I’m not a tidy artist, or a perfectionist, but there’s one thing that’s curtain… I’m every health and safety official’s nightmare.

This means there’s a lot of things that I would like to do with my work but can’t because, unfortunately, as i have to abide by the rules. Things such as seeing what blood would look like inside resin, human blood of course, as it would be cheating myself as an artist, and the viewer by using anything else. Also things like suspending glass sheets from the ceiling with imprints on, and mirrors above to reflect the viewer through the imprint, but alas money and rules come into consideration.

Anyway, enough rambling, lets crack on.

The next couple of videos will describe some of my main pieces of work so far and will be a general slide show of images (with commentary). I am doing this as a video rather than loading up over 1000 images (limit to 5 photos a post), to save you, the reader from having to read the amount of rambling I would have to do in roughly 200 posts, and because each of my photos is average 3mb (each) and I would have to down size every one of them just to put them on here!!

So sit back and enjoy…