The goal of my film and instillation will be to shine a light on the fetishisation of women’s bodies through food, thus makes our bodies objects to be consumed. These transformations, however, are very obviously failures, and they don’t end looking like sexual body parts at all, inducing the sense that this is another unattainable standard for women.
The work I will have chosen to display will help morph my film of transforming my body into fetishised foods even further, inducing the grotesque nature of it. The projected film will be projected from numerous projectors on top of plinths and onto numerous MDF boards, as seen below;
I’ll be hanging the pieces around eye-level, so that people can directly watch the projections. This will mean that the plinths will be around 4ft tall, and spaced correctly so that the hanging pieces are all projected onto.
The MDF boards will be 3-4 boards of a mixture of 3D works from my performances, and some will only be the colour of the fruits I have used. The 3D one’s will be ideal to display my performances, and will keep distorting the film, making it look strange, which will further the idea of how these fruit ideals (for example, “peachy bums”) are impossible for women to attain. The colour blocks will be used for flashbacks and perhaps showing the pieces I had made during the performance.
The film itself is a series of performances I’ve documented, and are heavily inspired by ORLAN’s body modifications, and Cindy Sherman’s “Grotesque Series” of food and photography. They both share a grisly theme to their work, which I believe I’ve captured by using mashed up food on my body in my performances. The idea of being a woman who fails at attaining expectations put onto her comes from Vanessa Beecroft’s work, who explores how women are mortal and simply aren’t made to be like dolls.
The curation of my piece has also come from numerous artists and exhibitions I have visited. I recently went to Paul Eastwood’s “Dyfodiaith” exhibition and performance, who used sound very effectively, by having the musicians, narrator, and singers all stood around the screening of the film. The semi-permanent exhibition of the film also had a similar effect, as the speakers were spread around the projection. My aim is to create a similar effect, as I’ve used narration and food sounds in my films. This will be done with speakers on either side, as well as sounds from the films coming directly from the projectors, creating an atmosphere of the sounds.
Other exhibitions I’ve researched, like Shin il Kim’s piece “Active Anesthesia”, shows how the artist seeks to shake viewers out of a passive, anesthetised state into one that inspires active engagement with their surroundings. These blocks of colours really inspired my decision to have projections on MDF boards of just colour (of the foods I’ve used) to show images and flashbacks onto.
Achim Hatzius’ piece, “Speculations on Anonymous Materials”, also lead me to change my mind about only displaying 3 projections. I was always taught to display things in three because of the aesthetic of it, and it would have also been a great link to femininity, as witches always “come in threes”. However, I really enjoy the four projections from Hatzius piece, and it would also give me more room to experiment with the projections themselves. I did not, however, think the projector holders would suit my work at all, as my theme revolves around the unattainable standards women face. Plinths would work much better to put the projectors onto, as plinths are often used to display figures of traditional ideal women in museums and exhibitions. They’d also link to my references to Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion in my film.
US 1970 Dirs Women’s Caucus, San Francisco Newsreel: including Louise Alaimo, Judy Smith, Ellen Sorin 40 min Digital presentation
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