Drawing- Identity

This is the starting point of my drawing project. I've drawn a generic face and experimented with ways in which to remove the faces identity. These are all the outcomes of the experiments. I want to move on from using this face and use photographs that I've taken.

Drawing- Final outcome

 This is the final outcome of my journey project for drawing. It is a selection of continuous line drawings suspended on a beam. For me presentation was important and I thought the way this looked further helped the outcome of my work.

Statement- Sculpture

I started sculpture quite unsure of what to produce. I took the two words loose and made and built the foundations of my work from there. I decided to play on the word ‘made’ and look at the way humans try to create things but simultaneously destroying things at the same time. While researching the artist Eva Hesse I was inspired by the way she used thread and wire to create delicate intricate pieces and thought this would link into my work perfectly. I combined life like casts of hands and thread to represent the delicate balance between creation and destruction in the world. While using the same materials my work expanded into something different. Taking inspiration from my own struggled at creating something perfect, I found a way to explore the ideas that the world is desperately striving for something perfect, and will do whatever possible to achieve this.

Jochem Hendricks

Jochem Hendricks is a contemporary artist from Germany. He is known for his works that address complex moral and ethical issues. The objects he produces are often beautifully realised, yet beneath the surface lie elaborate back stories, which – at times – test the boundaries of legality. His practise ranges from sculpture, film and photography to instillation and sculpture. Hendricks' work explores the value and meaning of labour, truth and story-telling, ethics and the role of the artist.

Some of Hendricks' work can be deemed rather controversial. For example, his work 'Cold Birds' which involved transforming dead birds into carbon, then ultra-pure graphite, and finally presented on a plinth as rough diamonds surrounded with a ring of plucked feathers. Even more shocking is 'Left Defender's Right Leg' a diamond created from the surgically removed limb of a footballer. With his work, it's not just about the end result, but about the processes as well and he also wants people to feel slightly uncomfortable about his work.

I first came across his work last year when he had an exhibition on at the Walsall New Art gallery, and started to research him when I noticed some similarities between some of his work and my sculpture work at the moment. His piece 'Collapsed Avatar' is a collection of collapsed porcelain and platinum busts. The life like casts and shine of the busts give create quite an alien and eerie atmosphere. I personally think it makes you question what you thought about art and how something broken could still be considered art. 

gcEven more shocking 

Final outcome

After several failed attempts at making perfectly cast hands, I was struck with another idea. All of my plaster hands kept breaking. I could of super glued them back together, but then it got me wondering why I was so concerned about the hands being perfect. People always strive for perfection in the day and age. Yet people will go to extreme measures to achieve perfection.

Instead of carefully attempting to repair the hands, I half heartedly tried to attach them all back together using nothing but thread. The results created deformed looking pieces of human body parts. The final outcome is a cluster of hands all connected in a mess of thread intertwined together and represents humans extreme ways of trying to achieve perfection, but instead we destroy everything.

My piece reminded me of an artist I saw at the Walsall Art Gallery named Jochem Hendricks. He too worked with the human body, instead making casts of his own head, with some of them being broken. I thought he could be a key person to research for sculpture.

Hands with thread

This is what the result of my first sculpture project looks like. I want the meaning behind this piece to be how humans destroy everything they touch. Instead of making some beautifully formed shapes or patterns with the thread, it has instead become tangled. This shows the how delicately close beauty and destruction can be. And the human race don't care for this, we are selfish beings who want good things for ourselves, while ignoring the consequences that might happen.

I would like to carry on using these themes in sculpture, hopefully being able to expand upon the idea while using the same materials.

Hands

These are the two hands I've made for sculpture. Although they're not as perfect as they could be, I was pleased with the result. The detail is rather eerily lifelike, which is the effect I'm going to go for. My next step was to intertwine thread between the hands.

Loose and Made

In sculpture we were given a list of words, for which we had to chose 2 of those words, and create a sculpture from it. I chose loose and made, initially not sure why but thought the words were open enough for me to create a lot of things.

The rough idea in my head is to incorporate hands into the piece. I want them to represent humans, and how we try to unsuccessfully create good things in the world. With the world maye being represented with thread, string or wire.

Statement for Paint

My project was originally about form, particularly focusing on portraiture. But as the weeks progressed, it evolved into something completely different. My concept is to show how people have changed the way we view the world, by using portraiture. By painting faces of famous/infamous figures on various objects or places, I'm conveying that in small and maybe unnoticeable ways they have changed things about the way we perceive society or the world. So my project evolved from looking at form, to it being about the environment instead. My project isn't initially about the skill it takes to paint the faces, but instead about the concept and the reason behind the face.

Statement- Drawing

The journey project was a difficult process for me. I didn’t have many ideas with what I wanted to do or in which direction I wanted to go. I started this off my going on straight forward journeys and seeing if anything inspired me on the way. I eventually came up with the idea of creating something more interactive. Inspired by the artist Mira Schindel, I didn’t want the final piece to be just a drawing, but instead incorporate drawing into an instillation. The final piece is to be something which feels like you are going on the same journey as well, and I hope that this is what the final outcome shall look like. The drawings are suspended in the air and almost move with you as you walk around it. Although I took the theme of a journey fairly directly, I didn’t want to presentation to be directly straight forward which I believed I achieved.

Glenn Ligon

While on the London trip at the Tate modern I noticed a piece of work by Glenn Ligon. It was a neon sign painted black saying 'America'. I was intrigued  and wanted to find out more about the meaning of this work. It's so simplistic, yet has so many possibilities of what it could be about.

I decided to use this piece of work for my CPS presentation about London. Ligon usually investigates the social, linguistic and political construction of race, gender and sexuality, and the representation of the individual in relationship to culture and history. This piece comments on the national self-fixation of the United States and the position of African Americans within the nation. He conveyed this by painting the glass tubed with black paint, creating a bold statement as its taking away the glamour, brightness and flash out of America.

I then found out that this one piece was part of a series, with three different neon lights, with all different meanings but still conveying the arrogance and darkness that America has become.

Mira Schendel

Mira Schendel was a Brazilian artist who through her later years was mostly considered a modernist painter and sculpture. I went to her exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. I found the most recent work the most interesting, especially in the materials that she uses. I didn't realise until later how much of an influence she had on my drawing project.

One of my favourite works by Schendel is 'Variants' 1977. It's an instillation with rice paper suspended in the air with thread. All of the materials she uses are delicate and fragile, and the use and delicate and translucent materials such as rice paper giver her a work a fragile and ethereal feel, as if they stand on the very edge of existence.

The final outcome of my final piece for my drawing project is fine liner drawings on tracing paper, suspended on a beam. It's similar to Schendels work in that we've both used fairly delicate materials and have suspended them in the air. Although I wasn't inspired by her themes, I think I found her presentation fascinating and a nice, more interactive way of displaying some types of work.

Stella Vine

Stella Vine is an artist who is mostly known for her figurative paintings of celebrities. The reason I'm researching her is because there is a large majority of people who do not like her portraits. Her paintings can be perceived as not requiring much skill or rather childlike. She attempts to pay tribute to celebrities, but whether the outcome is successful is debatable.

In a way her work is similar to work as my paintings are not realistic and not trying to look photo realistic. It's the message and the concept behind the portrait which I find more important than the outcome of the likeness of the painting.

Graham Sutherland

Graham Sutherland was an artist who during his career painted a number of portraits. The one I'm particularly interested in is his portrait of Winston Churchill. Churchill hates this painting and refused to display it. It was later found out that Lady Churchill destroyed the painting. I find it fascinating that one painting could cause so much hatred from one person and would resolve to the destruction of a piece of art.

Nelson Mandela

With the death of Nelson Mandela still very fresh in peoples mind, I thought it would be a good idea to do some work based on him. I decided to go back to doing quick paintings in random places as I think overall this had the best impact and worked well. I did small portraits of Mandela's face around the studio to convey the amount of impact he has had in the world that we live in today. Like the paintings their discreet and we probably don't notice, but the impact has definitely changed society.

Propeller

This painting is of Edward Smith who was the captain of the titanic. Many people believe if it wasn't for his poor decision making, the titanic might not have crashed into the iceberg and sank.

While I was happy with the way this looked, I found the interpretation too obvious and I fear I might be becoming too literal with my paintings and their meanings.

Margaret Thatcher

Wanting to continue to paint currently talked about figures, I thought painting Margaret Thatcher would be a good next step. The reason behind painting her on the back of my canvas as opposed to the front is because of the controversial that had surrounded the former prime minister while she was alive. For many people she is a hated figure who created more problems than solutions. So whether she deserved to be painting on a canvas is highly debatable. But by painting her face on the back it's almost like she doesn't exist or matter, which could represent the way many people feel about her.

Yet she has still been immortalised with paint, and although controversial, she did indeed cause change in society. So even though it's not noticeable like the portrait, things have been influentially changed because of her.

Coloured portrait

All of my portraits so far have been in black and white. I thought it would be a good idea to experiment with doing a coloured portrait and see if I liked the results. I decided to paint a portrait of Miley Cyrus because she's such a talked about person at the moment, mostly for the outrageous way she's behaving at the moment. Like my previous Miley Cyrus painting I did it on plastic.

Originally I wasn't so sure about the end result. I preferred the less literal interpretations I was getting with using black and white.

However something accidentally happened to this piece of work which actually gave it some meaning. Because of the large amount of layers of paint, the painting started to crack and fall off the plastic. I saw this as an opportunity to save this work from having no relevance to my project.

 I now see this piece as a representation of the deterioration of modern culture. The entertainment business is falling apart and people such as Miley Cyrus are gaining attention for the wrong reasons. The cracks in this painting covey the cracks of the entertainment industry and the influence it is creating with the younger generation of today.

Albert Fish

This painting is expanding onto the idea of controversial people being immortalised with paint. I picked the serial killer Albert Fish as his name may be well known but his is otherwise not. I wanted to see peoples reactions when they realised that such a monstrous figure has been painted on the back of a chair, an everyday object that is used all the time.

Artist talk

Presentation- Minho Kwon
In this presentation, I focused on one particular drawing by an artist called Minho Kwon. I saw his work in London at the Jerwood gallery for the Jerwood drawing prize. This particular piece of work is called 'Neo Tower of Babel' and is pencil on tracing paper.

I was interested by the structural nature of this drawing. Usually anything structural doesn't usually catch my interest but this intriged me. After doing some research on Kwon, it appears that his inspiration for his drawings could have stemmed from the regmented structure of his past in Korea, where he lived for most of his life. He intends for his work to respond to the world in which he lives.

He was introduced to architecture from an early age, so combined the two together to create the juxtaposition between the history and the politics of Korea. The result of this reveals drawings almost resembling an architects blueprint.

"These architectural elements are more than the means to an end; they are capable of acting as a metaphor, thereby revealing the imaginative scope of the work as a whole" Minho Kwon

His work at the Jerwood is a reconstruction of the Tower of Babel, which is something which forms the focus of a story told in the book of Genesis of the Bible. The story summed up is man set out to build the Tower of Babel, arrogantly assuming their technological skill would enable them to reach God. This angered God and to punish man he divided the language they spoke. Kwon's drawings visualize his interpretation of a new Tower. It also shows architecture from the Classical and Medieval through to the industrial and modern periods. The overlaying predictions depict the main sources of power from each of these periods.

Kwon wants to provoke questions such as whether we have already reached God or because of our arrogant nature we will be punished again. His technique of provoking these are to show the traces of human civilization; man's eternal drive towards God.

Feedback
In the feedback, we further discussed the idea that this is Kwon's way of saying human civilisation is becoming too advanced and too arrogant. Questions were asked as to why there was something which looked like a Centar in the drawing. I wasn't able to find any information about this and everyone including myself found it particularly odd that there was something organic in such a structured geometric drawing. My guess is that is has something to link to the religious side of it, perhaps mocking the Christian story by adding a mythological creature in there.

Another thing which was discussed in the feedback were the faint, horizontal pencil lines which went all across Kwon's drawing. On first glance, it looks like they're just used for a backdrop to help construct the drawing. But it was mentioned by someone else that they could have an alternative meaning. With the lines not erased, the drawing looks unfinished. And this could link to the fact that that Kwon's 'Tower' is never finshed, t's still being constructed because of the speed that the human race is advancing.