Mixed Media
Friday, 14 July 2017
Flesh
These are the pieces that I submitted to be exhibited at the UWE Fine Art First Year student held exhibition with the running theme of 'Flesh'. Greatly interested by textures and folds and creases of the skin, I decided to translate and exaggerate those textures into these surfaces created from calico and glue and water. Soaking the calico in a mixture of glue and water renders it stiff after drying, allowing me to manipulate it into peaks and folds and which held their shape.
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| Flesh Exhibition view |
I was fortunate enough to be able to see his solo exhibition at the Victoria Miro and it really blew me away. Some of his ideas and execution of those ideas, the ways in which his pieces could be perceived and understood, as well as techniques he has used resonate with what I am interested in.
It is with the same elegant economy of conceptual means, focusing on simple yet transformative acts of repetition, that Suh treats the complex psychological and physical architectural structures of the concept of 'home'. In work for which he is widely known, the artist meticulously constructs proportionally exact replicas of dwelling places, architectural features, or household appliances – kitchen sinks, toilets and microwaves – from stitched planes of translucent, coloured polyester fabric. Often reflections of places the artist has inhabited, such as his childhood home or Western apartments, these delicately precise, weightless impressions seem to exist between imagination and reality. Suh has spoken of the distinctive openness to the environment of Korean homes; more than repositories of personal memory or nostalgic projections, his works respond to the indistinct boundaries between psychic interior and objective exterior, which make of home an ongoing lived function rather than a physical structure.
His one-to-one scale of physical structures, which was exhibited at the gallery I visited, of passages and corridors of sorts delicately made with translucent fabric gives form to ideas about migration, transience and shifting identities. It was really fascinating to see silhouettes, figurative shapes uniformly meandering through this corridor of colourful polyester fabric when viewing from beyond the installation itself. In this piece though it isn’t his greatest concern, concepts regarding transparency which relates with Lee ByungChul’s theories pervades and exists. It was a totally different way of conveying and playing around with obscuring and revealing things, he made it a multi-sensory experience for the viewer which is something that I aspire to be able to create in the future.
Suh also introduces a new process to produce his large-scale two-dimentional drawings using gelatin tissue sewn in the same way as his architectural fabric pieces. Once immersed in water the gelatin dissolves, leaving behind a trace, a skeletal framework of what the form once was. They are highly visceral works of art, their translucent and ghostly nature making me want to pursue a similar technique when creating surfaces to project onto since there is a distinguishable layered and structured quality to them especially when viewed up close.
Thursday, 8 June 2017
Tangled
Revisiting a project I did during my foundation where the primary source for development was drawings of hair, I chose to tackle it literally rather than figuratively and focused largely on the immediate representations of hair instead of abstracting it. I took up close photographs of different hair textures and during the process wondered about the strangeness of how hair found ON the body is largely seen as beautiful, integral and almost worshipped, whereas isolated and AWAY from the body it is seen as disgusting and repulsive. With this in mind I gathered materials such as rope and netting, materials with textures reminiscent of that of hair and assembled a hanging piece of work with which to project my images of hair on to.
Above are photoshop mock ups of how I imagined, or ideally envisioned how the projection would look like and below is what was actually exhibited. I think the hair textures looks incredible enlarged and projected like that.
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“Tangled”, 2016; fishing net, mesh ribbon,
string, colour image projection; 110 x 140 cm,
Spike Island
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Sunday, 4 June 2017
Location II
These analogue experimentations were part of a 'Location' project where we had to develop pieces of work based around the location that your group was given, in my case, a graveyard. The above images were primarily inspired by a photograph I took at the graveyard with a decomposing leaf slightly obscuring the lens of the camera so that shapes were blocked out and revealed at the same time. I cut out the light areas/orbs in the image of the tree canopy and juxtaposed them on top of blurry motion capture images. I placed the cut out image accordingly so that the main subject of the image underneath is still discernible through the shapes and lines that conceal it. The fragments look almost like a mosaic, and through squinted eyes perhaps a kaleidoscope.
The next two images are my way of 'prolonging' instantaneous moments, extending the 'now' by cutting up two disparate images and arranging them alternately and in a very structured, kind of uniform manner.
Thursday, 1 June 2017
Inspiration: Kim Kei
Kim Kei's process begins with the construction and combining of everyday materials and natural debris such as bits of fabric and scrap pieces of material to create ephemeral, vibrant sculptures - finished pieces of works on their own right. She proceeds to take it further by photographing these assemblages in several iterations and perspectives, translating her sculptures into ink, acrylic and oil paintings. Though these constructs more commonly reference figure and form or rather lack of it, I actually like to interpret both sculptures and paintings as galaxies, or an unreachable utopia drawn from the artist's subconscious, suspended in space. The peaks in her sculpture and tonal variation in her paintings also remind me of the way mountains and mountainous terrain are represented in maps and geological images.
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