Prints!

       So on Tuesday I made some prints ..for the first time this year I might add, so they are not amazing...but I really enjoyed the process and it was good to try something new! I started trying to make mono prints of some kind of human traces, like a blurred, is-it-a-person-figure but I didn't really like the finished pieces. I had some wallpaper with me so I decided to make a print of those instead! I think wallpaper in itself is a form of a human trace....it's evidence of human presence however long ago.... 

 

Prints of wallpaper...

Franchesca Woodman

        This artist was recommended to me by one of the tutors last week and when I researches her work yesterday I found it really relevant to me. Franchesca Woodman was born in America in the 1950s. She took her first self portrait photo at only 13. In her 30s, when in Art College, she took these series of photographs. I really love them . I think they are absolutely beautiful.There is something haunting and eerie about the images. Woodman used long exposure to capture movement- creating photos of her trace in these old, run down spaces. There is a ghostly timelessness to her work. I particularly like the photo where Woodman  is peeking out behind wallpaper and a fireplace...it's almost as though she is becoming part of her space (/ vice-versa).  I find Woodman's photos sad when I consider the fact that she committed suicide at only 22. These photos are her legacy. Her work is often debated.....some think she passes comment on woman's social standing, others think she wanted to explore the human body in space. Someone suggested she wanted to disappear in her surroundings, ultimately like she did in life. This morbid reading of her work is denied by her father.
       I would like to take influence and inspiration from her work, esp. the long exposure and the illusionistic feeling to her work.  Over the weekend I had begun a video in an old, broken down house my Nana owns. It used to be our holiday home when we were younger and it holds a lot of important childhood memories for me. It kind of ties in with Franchesca's work...capturing a human trace in a very empty space.


Self Portrait at 13!

More Traces!

Here are (yet again....) image transfers I did this week, using the acrylic gloss gel.....my fingertips were seriously raw! I really like some of them, some capture both memories and human traces...

 

My home

Paris

Paris

Paris

Life Drawing

I've been busy this week with image transfers, handing in my first essay on Wednesday (whoo) and life drawing on Monday. I had never done proper life drawing before so it was a really good experience. The main objective was capturing movement and motion as opposed to human form. I'm posting some of the images, others just look like a load of lines and circles on a page, but I suppose it's all mark making .... Most of the poses were under a minute which meant I really had to loosen-up and draw quickly. I guess it was like capturing a human trace...?

 

So here are some more image transfers. I have been collecting things all weekend which I can transfer onto! I will be busy this week!! :-)

 

 

Image Transfers..,,

 I have had no Internet in the flat all week so I've felt totally disconnected from the rest of the world. I've been looking at trying to translate my ideas of human trace but without relying so entirely on the figure and movement. So last week I had a little think about how I leave my imprint on this world etc. and I thought of the accumulation of things we take from or leave in the spaces we pass through. Like bus stubs, concert tickets, shopping receipts, plastic bags, food wrappers, letters , postcards, wrappers, photographs, footprints, hair, DNA, warmth, butt spaces, fingerprints , memories, smells etc.....There are loads of little pieces of physical evidence of humans and the mark they leave on a space. For example , last night I was on a bus and noticed scrunched up bus tickets on the ground. There was a newspaper lying open on the chair in front of me, its owner gone but somehow you knew he had sat there, however temporarily, occupying that space. There was also little packets of sugar thrown around and sticky finger-prints on the window.
 
  The bus held very little importance to me and I doubt many people would see it as a special place for them . So while human traces were very evident, they were not super exciting to me. This week I've been focusing more on the spaces that are important to me , my home, holiday venues etc. As much as I left my trace on them , they have imprinted on me, as memories and have impacted my life. I have been trying to marry these ideas this week through image transfers. I use photos from places very important to me and transfer them (using acrylic gloss gel) onto keepsakes and souvenirs and evidences of my trace, like tickets, receipts and even shopping bags! Old wallpaper from home has also featured in these works. I think there is something really sad about wallpaper, it's easily ignored and forgotten about. It's just a faint, hardly-noticed part of a given space.....just like the human traces I'm trying to convey. So that's why I'm using old flowery, gaudy bits of wallpaper that has been sitting around for ages with these transfers ! It's a very fun process because there is a real element of unknown about how successful the transfers will be . So that's been my week...I've nearly made my fingertips raw from the rubbings but i hope it'll be worth it (once I'm happy with at least some of them !!)

 

These are some from earlier in the week, I've been making more since so hopefully i'll get the pictures up this weekend!

Time and Traces.......

   An artist I found on Tumblr this week and really like is John Clang. He is a photographer and visual designer. I love his work 'Time'    : '' A series that involves recording a location, to show the passing of time in a montage style. There is a sense of intimate intricacy of how time moves, and how people, albeit in a different time, are actually closer to one another and travelling in the same shared space. I’ve always been intrigued by the constant subtle changes in my urban environment. Every subtle shift affects my feelings and thoughts, hence my images respond acutely as a poetic reflection of myself in this environment. Working on this series, I explore how time moves in this seemingly static urban space. The people become the moving energy flowing through this space, marking the changes, forming the time. These images also explore my fascination that there are probably many time dimensions in this universe. We may have a ‘life’ that exists similarly on a different path, one minute before or after the one we’re living now. We merely just exist in this current dimension, and sometimes when time paths collide, we have déjà vu experience. ''   I love how he captures a sense of time passing , of capturing all the different people who occupy that space. To me, when I look at these images, they represent for me all the traces of people who passed through this space , who temporarily occupied it.....
  
  

Paper sculpture......

 So I finally made a paper sculpture. It's my first attempt so hopefully it can only get better!! I used old wallpaper because I like how this is something we take for granted, we hardly notice it on our walls, it blends into its space.....so for me it's like the nature of our trace/ imprint on a space. It's not something we can really see or notice. We sense a person's absence (maybe this is like their negative space? )  but like wallpaper it's simply there in the background, it becomes part of our space.

 

 

I think as a way of improving these I might try and make them again but in a much smaller scale! !