Assessment Personal Statement 14/12

After looking into sex work last year, I decided to take another route by taking a more playful idea of how we, millennials and other younger generations, have sexualised emojis, especially food emojis. Looking into this, I found that we have always sexualised food, whether it is in art, film or novels, and this is a progression from that.

I first of all looked at using sex work to prove the sexualisation of foods that represented phallic objects, such as bananas and aubergines. However, I did not want to take such a serious route of using anything that could potentially bring any harm or be insensitive, and thought that making a profile as a camera girl would work. I ate a banana live and documented the comments I received, which did conclude that it was turned into a sexual innuendo, which I knew would happen in the environment I chose to do it on. Would I have had a different reaction going live on Instagram, Facebook, etc? In my opinion, not hugely, but the comments would not have been as crude and obviously sexual as I wanted them to be for the purpose of my work.

I developed these ideas into fruit machines, keeping with the playful side of my work. I painted this series inspired by photographs I found online of fruit machines; some had game shows on them, and some were called “Chav It” with a cartoon of a “Chav” on the top, and others were standard fruit machines. This sparked the idea of using my camera girl research for this series by using myself to replace the advertisement or the “Chav” joke on the fruit machine, and even use comments and messages I received by viewers when I went live as a way of documenting what I had found.

I also experimented with wax and oil paint for my camera girl research, which include photographs of Medusa and a photograph of me the night I went live as a camera girl. They surprisingly came out well, therefore I thought that including these alongside my painting series was important to show the development of my work as research paintings in my most recent exhibition, “Get Loose”.

I have also been looking at fruit machines and how I could potentially use that for my work, as I used cherries as “comments” in a recent painting and it was received reasonably well by my peers, as well as translated my ideas well. Because of this, I am hoping to carry this through for the next few weeks, as it would certainly be in keeping with being playful and flirtatious. This might potentially lead to buying an old fruit machine and change the fruit symbols into emojis and see what I can come up with, but this could prove to be difficult if it is a big machine, but en exciting project for next term.