Where am I now?
(I want to give my blogs mini headings just so that I can keep on top of what I’m posting, you’ll notice that I do sometimes go off track and by doing this I will try and stay focused.)
The past two weeks have been a breakthrough for me and at this current point in time I’ve fallen back in love with art again. Last year I had a tough time figuring out who I am and why I want to make art work, for me the answer was always simple I just loved art but along the way I had forgotten that. I think that continuing to make work whilst feeling rather withdrawn and uninspired is what has inevitably allowed me to get through it. Art had become a chore for me and I thought to myself why I am looking at the same things time after time? How can someone like me, who was always told in education to leave art well alone, make some sort of life out of art?
Recently I’ve found the answer to all these questions and it is I’m afraid rather vague and slightly clichéd; Art isn’t a reason for me it isn’t an answer to all my questions. Instead, art is a feeling, something that I can’t live without and can’t stop doing.
So that is what got me to where I am today, my little epiphany has given me the old rush of needing to create work. And that’s what I’ve spent these past two weeks doing.
To keep you up to speed (and hopefully not too confused) my quest for beauty is still on-going. Last week I spoke with one of my tutors during a tutorial and I have to say I’m going to miss that bouncing inspiration between two artists when I graduate, thinking about it now I’d love to work in a space with artists once I leave university.
But I am straying from my focus, in this tutorial we spoke about me and my ideas. It was so refreshing to just say ideas that I had been turning over in my mind for weeks and you see I’m not particularly confident thus sometimes I find it difficult to say what I think. However, we talked about how I like to write in my spare time and how I could bring this in to my work which was very exciting to hear. So we thought and thought about it, we spoke of women writers like J.K Rowling and how certain writers (like Rowling) have a schedule that they have to stick to; so for example going to a coffee shop at a certain time and having a specific cup of tea. It was quite interesting to think about the process writers and artists undergo to produce work, we thought it would be interesting for me to write a schedule to stick too – perhaps invent a fictional one.
You see the mention of writers, I think, is really relevant when thinking about my work seeing as in my photos I create these characters so in effect I am doing a similar thing to writers.
By exploring beauty in its different forms I am creating people, people who resemble me but never look like me. The next step then would be to create a story for these different characters, tell you their lives, and make up their stories for them. By simply donning a wig and a set of different clothes I am a different person, I wouldn’t intentionally want to look or dress that way, which is a different way of interpreting my work. This led us to think about women writers who had to use as pseudonym just to get their wonderful stories published, like the Bronte sisters, I thought this too was an interesting approach. Perhaps I could invent a pseudonym for each person that I create?
At the moment I am sifting through ideas and as I approach the maximum post word count I realise that my ideas are becoming more concrete so for now I’ll leave you with this new train of thought and do some experiments. To the right of this post you’ll see the images that I had recently created which informed this tutorial.
I want to now research artists who perhaps invent a character for themselves, if you have any suggestions or comments I’d really appreciate it!
