Tag Archives: DEVELOPMENT

COMFORT :Initial Responses

Theme

Starting this new project I wanted to explore the idea of comfort. A theme a touched on in the last project thinking about contrast between comfort and discomfort.

Initial Responses

When I think of what comfort is for me I immediately think of objects I surround myself with and things I do or keep that sooth and bring me this feeling. Weather thats because of the person that gave me the item or memories attached to it. I also have unconscious things i do repeatedly that I guess sooth me in some way and I assume I do to make me feel comfortable. So initially I just made a digital collage on my phone of all the first thing that come to mine to me when I think about comfort. Making a list of anything I didn’t have an image of. the collage itself isn’t very thinking about possible avenues for the project and consider how personal i wanted to make it.

Thinking about home, specifically my mums house, I made a little house model out of soft pink clay which I initially though was rubbish but i guess everyone finds the thought of their childhood home comforting to come extent. I also took a lot of pictures of my bed a place I feel everyone experiences the ultimate sense of comfort. However has become a place i’m spending the majority of my time in to a point it becomes uncomfortable and i feel unproductive, in excess it brings around feelings of depression. Thinking about my space and how I occupy it I do use a lot of pink and always associate it with my room specifically sleeping and my bed. Lastly this week I made bubble wrap bra and pants to kind of represent the comfort and fragility I have within being in my own body and how hard it is to love your own body and how you almost need to protect this as a woman. My own body is my forever home and though its often difficult I think its really important to find comfort and safety in your own skin.

Initially I found starting the project and finding a theme was very challenging I think based on all of the things iv made and i’m exploring so far i’m confident this project has a lot of scope and i’m excited to further explore things like comfort space and the materials usage.

Secrets: Work & Environment

Following the crit I wanted to focus on Bringing my work and confessions physically into these environments making them real rather than having them only exist on pieces of paper. All reactions and feed back so far has been from people I know either in studio or people i have spoken to about secrets. I want to start exposing these secrets and confessions to the environments were they are most often thought about. How i wanted to go about this and what kind of things i wanted to say i wasn’t sure of yet so looked at artists Jenny Holzer, Sophie Calle, Barbera Kruger and Gillian Weaing.

Truisms

The artist uses her surroundings and physically projects her work on to them. Rather than having her work in an already artistic space (studio or gallery) where people who are coming to see the work already have a preconceived expectation that what they are looking is is considered art. By placing it outside in very public spaces it opens it up to be interpreted to anyone in anyway. Her ‘Truisms’, 1977-79 are a collective of nearly 300 phrases and slogans of modern cliches and commonly held truths. The work was at first infiltrated into public ares via stickers, T-shirts and posters. Later, Holzer started using electronic displays. In 1982 she blazed these messages across a giant advertising hoarding in Times Square, New York. The Truisms are deliberately challenging, presenting a spectrum of often-contradictory opinions. The artist hoped they would sharpen people’s awareness of the ‘usual baloney they are fed’ in daily life. I liked how the artist gradually increased the spread and scale of her work and reflected how huge companies and manufactures manage to invade or space everyday through advertising and media. Her work also invading everyones space but instead of trying to sell them nothing asked them to question what they were being told.

Posters Development

I started to think about putting these secrets and confessions physically out on the street and in ares i visited on a daily basis that I could find myself being quiet or with my own thoughts. I experimented with just photocopying the original confession slips as well as writing them out just using acrylic paint and cutting out letters from magazines.


Photocopying– captured the authenticity of the original confession each persons handwriting added another felling of identity to each bit of paper as if that person themselves had decided to share and spread that secret
Hand painted– This added a more human quality to the photo coppys as i physically had to paint the message in my handwriting on the paper. It felt more like i was the one exposing this information and trust of that person despite the fact it still remained anonymous.
Cut outs – Using the cut out letters from magazines to spell out the confessions made it feel completely anonymous as it took away any form of identity and the act of writing it out had to be a lot more time consuming and thought out.

While I liked all of the methods for their own individual consensual quality so i decided to use a mix of them simply because i wanted a range of styles and didn’t mind the inconsistency as each persons way of keeping a secret or telling someone my differ from person to person.

The locations for the pictures where all places i visited over the course of 3 days where if i found myself alone or it was particularly quiet in a public area I would lave one of the confessions at random. I then took a shot video and left. In total I took around 20 photos and these ones were my effective as i feel they look the most alone and quiet in a sense because of the lack of other people but still let you know enough yo image them in an area where a lot of people might pay attention to them on passing.

Below is the video to accompany the images I took.

I took short videos of all the posters I put up and combine them. I like how the video turned out as it feels very lonely despite all of it taking place in very public spaces. I also like the fact that they seem very discarded in the places they have been put up as if only thought about for a second or two. The noise of some of the videos was important as i wanted the feeling of things still going on around the confessions just as people go on carrying these secrets.