Booster Week – 31/01/19

Today was a busy day of editing, learning how to edit, meetings, and writing my exhibition proposal. I began taking apart what I had filmed and planned vaguely what I wanted from them. I wanted to draw attention to the juices that ran down my body, therefore made sure the clip of that was zoomed in, and also decided to zoom into my happy facial expression at one point. I also gathered recordings of people eating fruit, specifically peaches and other juicy fruits to add to the background, as well as me reciting a piece from Paula James’ (2011) “Ovid’s Myth Of Pygmalion on Screen”, all of  which I’m still deciding on where to put them effectively.

I then attended a meeting with Morfudd Mathews to discuss creating a blog in Welsh for the university. My role will be to write about my experience at the networking trip to Aberystwyth last week, and will send her a draft my next Monday. We discussed what information I should include in the post, as well as who else speaks Welsh at the school to contribute to this blog, therefore I supplied her with everyone I knew who have participated in Welsh opportunities in the past.

My task after this was to start writing my exhibition proposal, which is due tomorrow. I needed this week to finalise my ideas regarding this, as I was finding it hard piecing my thoughts together without creating actual work to practice and back them up.

 

Booster week – 30/01/19

Today was filled with printing out my best images from yesterday and organising what worked best together. I also started editing the films that will hopefully be done by next week.

I also attended a meeting with Esyllt George and my group who are organising the Women’s Empowerment exhibition, just to lay-out what we wanted to bring up in the meeting at G39 next Tuesday with Anthony Shapland. We’ve decided on asking for all available dates around March and April and work with those, as we think that would be the best time before our own exhibition build up begins. Es is also going to ask Creative Writing students if they would like to participate in a spoken word activity that might be held on the evening of the exhibition.

The afternoon was then a presentation with Dr. Manal Helal Ayoub, who’s an associate professor from Egypt who has come over to speak about her sculptural work, and was a very interesting to speak to. Her favourite works of mine are these below;

The first piece is of a line drawing she did and decided to make into a 3D sculpture, which was a refreshing abstract piece that I found aesthetically pleasing to look at.

The second is of a man who cleans her department at her university, and she simply chose him to life model for her because she liked his features, such as his moustache and big ears.

Personal statement

The fetishisation of food has become a hugely important aspect of my recent work. The playful and flirtatious nature of eating on camera for an audience to document the sexual reactions has developed from paintings of a sexual emoji fruit machine into a grotesque representation of the female body as an object to be consumed. These have been heavily inspired by ORLAN’s body modifications, where I have challenged the use of fruit emojis as representations of the female body, such as cherries and peaches, and created a series of images documenting my grotesque transformation into these specific fruits.

These are shown through films and photographs of me using my own body for these failing transformations. I have used clay and fruit to make cherry breasts and peachy bums, and used the left-overs of these performances as pieces in their own right. These pieces will perhaps be displayed as objects to project my images and/or films onto them when I choose to display them. My work shines a light on the new era of impossible body ideals, where online dating has developed its own sexual language through imagery rather than words, and questions why exactly is it predominantly aimed at women’s bodies.

Tacita Dean

Dean explores both specific historical events and formal qualities of the 16 mm film, as seen in her Disappearance at Sea (1996) and The Green Ray (2001). Dean’s use of celluloid film, photography, installation, and drawing, seems an act of mourning for the analog world of documents and photographs as it passes into the realm of a massive digital archive. “A world that won’t forget is a world drowned in its not forgetting,” she reflected. “Do we want a world full of unedited memory? To be human is to be finite.”

I was told during a tutorial with David to look into Dean because I sometimes use landscapes in my work outside of university. He was keen to find out if there is a tension between this work and my subject practice, and if there was a way to use both at the same time, since my landscape painting technique differs so much with my painting in the studio. She edits her photographs to look like they have mysterious, unknown backstories; “I do not want to give these images explanations: descriptions by the finder about how and where they were found, or guesses as to what stories they might or might not tell. I want them to keep the silence of the fleamarket; the silence they had when I found them; the silence of the lost object.”. This concept is hugely interesting to me, but I’m currently struggling to find out how this could connect my two sides of work. Perhaps it doesn’t need an explanation at all?

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

I’m currently trying to relate the fruit in my pieces and figure out why exactly I’m using them in my work. Women have always been used in advertisements for food, whether it be shopping for it, or eating it, especially foods like chocolate and other sweet foods. There is also a link between women being the foods themselves, such as wanting to have a “peachy bum”, or having “melons” as breasts, linking to the word’s attitude towards women – simply a product to be consumed, and usually by men.

This is where Giuseppe Arcimboldo comes in with his imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, and flowers. The foods often look phallic, and possibly represents other body parts, depending on how you interpret it;

I want my work to sort of capture how my body can represent a fruit, but entirely grotesquely to correspond with my ideas surrounding the sexualisation of women’s bodies, and offer a tongue-in-cheek piece that represents how we do this through the use of emojis. But as we can see, it has been done in other ways for centuries, is has just since developed with technology. This will, hopefully, follow the route of Cindy Sherman’s performances, as well as ORLAN’s body modifications.

Booster week – 29/01/19

I’ve now booked the AV Studio for lunch time, which will give me an hour to film my first piece of this week using fruit to mould onto my body. I also plan on using my studio space to prep this film, which might mean I’ll have to practice the performance, thus why I’ve chosen to put up a warning sign next to my space. 

My time at the AV studio was well spent, as I was able to take both a film and pictures of my developing ideas, which is to make use my body as something that wants to become the fruit it “resembles”, and turn it into something quite grotesque.

Here are a few pictures that came from the experiment;

I squeezed cherries onto my breasts and peaches onto my bum to represent how I wanted the both of them to look like, which turned out to look gross and almost bloody, which is what I intended on happening. The juices running down is effective in this as well. I wanted the “look” to have failed, thus making the audience aware that it is definitely an unattainable ideal, perhaps adding some humour to this piece as well.

I’ll be taking some time to research into film-making in order to create something from the footage I’ve collected in the past few weeks, including this piece.

Booster week – 28/01/19

Today was spent preparing for my interview for being a Venice Invigilator for the Wales in Venice show this summer. It took up all of my morning, and most of my afternoon, which means I’ll have to work overtime on a few days to make sure my week is well-spent, concentrating on producing as much work as I possibly can. I think the interview itself went alright, and will find out this Wednesday if I’ll get to take part.

The rest of the day was spent catching-up on blog work and making an action plan for this week’s creative project for booster week. I feel that this week was entirely focused on preparing for the interview and applying for master courses, which now means I can use most of my time generating actual work for my subject area. I also had a tutorial with David to help organise my ideas, and spark a few new ones. The notes I took are pictured below;

They consist of looking up artists, such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who used fruit in his portraits, and Tacita Dean, who works with film and landscape. My other ideas are to directly use fruit in my next pieces, which will be photography/film, and use them to mould onto my body, similar to my film last week with clay. I then went to buy fruit I often use in my work, such as cherries and peaches, and will begin to work with them tomorrow.

Wales In Venice application process and interview

The Venice application has indeed been a long, but exciting process. I found the application itself fine, as it was all about organising my experiences, skills, and future ideas surrounding my artwork. I was also keen on fixing up an artist CV, because I had wanted to organise my work experience to a; one, part-time job CV, and two; have one entirely dedicated to my art and creative work. This was great practice to both create a CV that looked professional, but interesting and creative at the same time. The most challenging aspect of the application was finding a creative way to display my work to them, as I was capped at only showing three examples. I decided to create a website portfolio, with information next to the chosen pieces. It was very pink and colourful, to match the feminine aspect of my work, and included past work, present work, and ideas for future work. The portfolio is seen below;

https://sarabach.myportfolio.com/work?fbclid=IwAR0MZzoh_aLrABdkkZ0gKQBfjEc1LSaUusccLenkyv0ospJf9jBizXBObCw

I was then delighted to receive an email asking to be interviewed on Monday the 28th of January, which I immediately accepted. I then began preparing for the interview, and decided that my presentation would be about Sean Edwards himself. I began looking for his books in the library, which was actually in the special collections section, meaning I had to book a slot specifically to see them. This proved to be challenging, however, because I wasn’t allowed to photocopy the images or information, or leave that section of the library with the books. Therefore, I arranged to take better pictures of the pages I wished to include in my presentation. This was, of course, done after I got permission from Sean himself to use his work, to avoid copyright issues.

There were also questions I had to prepare for, such as what my project will be while I was invigilating in Venice, which meant I had to think carefully about how I wanted to use that time in my career and practice. I wrote everything, and rehearsed it before the interview took place, and my notes are all below;

I will find out Wednesday the 30th if my application was successful or not. However, I won’t be entirely disappointed if I don’t get a place, because getting this far was already amazing in regards to how many people had applied, and has offered me great practice on future applications.

My tutorial and assessment feedback

I was assessed by Paul, who commented this;

“Congratulations on passing the ADZ6333 Consolidate Pass/Fail assessment.

You have worked steadily this term and exhibitied work. Yet it feels that at the present moment your work is lacking some direction. The camera girl/eating fetish video photos and paintings showed good potential which currently feels underexploited with the fruit machine paintings. The connection between representations of fruit machines and flirtatious food fetish millenials does not convince at this stage. This blur in your intentions might be due to a transition phase your work is undergoing now, continued work on the ideas and outputs will likely lead to a clearer perspective. You should consider developing photo and video work, as well as experiment with a real fruit machine.

Your statement is too long and narrative. You should also expand your contextualisation, for example borrow “The Artist’s Joke” Document of Contemporary Art book from the Library and see if some of the texts by artists and theorists apply to some aspects of your work.

So far you have shown a satisfactory level of knowledge and understanding in the subject area, and your artworks are developing in a way that embodies the research you are doing in this area. Your skills are still developing and you need to keep working hard so that your ideas come through more clearly.”

I’m taking steps to follow his critique of my current work, and developing my ideas into a more set direction. I’m doing this with more photography and experimentation after researching into artists, like Cindy Sherman and ORLAN, who’ve both experimented with food and the grotesque, which is where I feel my work is now directed at.

My artist statement is a lot shorter and more concise too, and I’ll be altering it every few weeks to correlate with my current work.

Opportunity to speak to Will Gompertz about the Artes Mundi 8 exhibition

I was recently asked to speak to Will Gompertz about what I thought of the Artes Mundi 8 exhibition by one of the invigilators, Thomas Williams, and Angie Dutton, the university’s research and Enterprise Co-ordinator, however I was unable to attend because I was in Aberystwyth at a Welsh-speaking networking project, aimed to start getting to know Welsh artists all over Wales. This opportunity, however, was an honour to have been approached by two different people to be interviewed, and I do hope I’m still on the radar to be approached again in the near future.

The screenshot below is in the medium of Welsh, but roughly translates to Thomas asking if I could be interviewed for the 10pm BBC show of the Artes Mundi prize, at 2pm the next day. I declined with an explanation that I was currently in Aberystwyth, but thanked him for the offer.

This offer, I believe, was because of the volunteering and networking I’ve been doing the past couple of months, enabling me to be a choice when it comes to a few opportunities that may arrive. This is making me feel confident about slowly becoming a part of the Cardiff art scene, and building a connection group within Cardiff who can reach out to me for favours and opportunities.