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.
