Great Pair of Onions

My goal during the meantime of this busy period is to keep filming as many clips as I can. I’m hoping to create a large archive of footage and films I can add to my final piece. I’m planning another food-based performance for this weekend towards it, but until then, I decided to play with onions as breasts. I really like the layers they have, which almost gives the onion the look of a nipple once the brown skin’s been peeled, as if I’d undressed it. Onions, when cut, can also induce tears, which I found interesting to experiment with too. I added sound effects to this film; some were from the cutting and peeling, and some were used before of people eating.

Assessment Presentation

Overall the immediate feedback was that I’d covered everything, except for the internet content of my artwork on my creative development presentation, which is great news. James was really helpful in advice about what projectors to use, and told me to ask Neil about Short Throw Projectors which I’d be able to use in lit rooms. I’m also planning on borrowing some from G39 if they were available.

A PGC student was also shadowing James during this assessment, who gave me advice to look at Bill Viola’s projections to see how differently I could possibly project my films onto my objects.

Bill Viola;

Viola is a pioneer of video art, and has been one of its most important practitioners for more than forty years. Characteristic qualities of his work, such as the interplay between movement and stasis, and the testing of the viewer’s perception through multiple sensations, have become recurring elements of the medium as a whole.

Tiny Deaths was made in 1993. Barely visible figures are perceived in the darkened space until crescendos of light and sound bring moments of drama. The three projections envelop the viewer in the intense experience of the appearance and sudden disappearance of these presences. ‘The struggle we are witnessing today is not between conflicting moral beliefs’, Viola observed in 1992. ‘It is between our inner and our outer lives, and our bodies are the area where this belief is being played out.’ His works of the 1990s consistently show the body as the site for physical transformations – often through immersion in light or water – that embody these profound concerns with transformation and mortality. 

 

Diffusion Internship – Day 5

Today was a day of researching. I researched and compared prices of everything we needed, including sofas, walls, ceiling lampshades, tables, benches, etc. I also tried to keep the stores within walking distance in Cardiff so that we wouldn’t have to deliver them and save time.

I sent them all over by email to be checked, and also updated my spreadsheets and asana group project account while I was doing this. I also finished my artist personal statements and added them to google sheets to share with the rest of the group.

The last part of the day was spent making boxes to move the books and objects from the reception area, ready for the movers. They weren’t strong enough to hold the books by themselves so a lot of time was spent taping the bottom together. This took a lot longer than we expected, and had everyone involved due to the amount of boxes we needed to make.

Diffusion Internship – Day 4

Today will consist of packing up the Turner House library and artist research towards the Shift events, as well as the personal statements I’ll need to write up. I also began my research into furniture/essentials I’ll need to order to my venue, Shift, by the 18th of March. I’ll hear more about what the venue/reception needs soon, along with a budget.

The library is now fully boxed up and painted, ready to be moved into a storage space that is yet to be confirmed. The making of the boxes was the part that took longest, as they weren’t strong enough to hold the books by themselves, meaning that we had to tape all loose parts of the cardboard boxes.

We also put up a spreadsheet as a group of everything we’ll need for each of the artists and their pieces. I made one for Shift, while the other interns focused on their venues. This taught me a lot about online group work and how we could all contribute and edit to a spreadsheet together, making the entire process a lot easier and smoother.

New short – Inspired by Jean Cocteau’s 1950 Orpheus

I’ve been collecting ideas towards my final piece, and was inspired by Jean Cocetau’s Orpheus (1950) and the mirror scene. I thought it was perfect for explaining my ideas around fetishisation, as women very often would pose in front of a mirror when taking photos of their bodies, thus linking with the theme of comparing women’s bodies to food. (Photos for reference are below)

The film itself is me putting on gloves that enables me to reach and get fruit from inside of the mirror. This is similar to the Orpheus film, where he uses gloves to travel inside the mirror, which is how I decided to end my film. This is meant to represent the consumption of my own body image in a humerous way. I was very undecided about using sounds or narration in this piece, but decided to leave it silent for now, and then possibly add audio in the future.

I’ve also been prepping my boards that measure up to fit a 4:3 aspect ratio for the projectors. I’ve painted them in different food colours that will represent the food I use in the films, including yellow for bananas, orange for the peaches, purple for the aubergine, and red for the cherries.

 

 

Diffusion Internship – Day 3

This morning I spent time taking out screws, filling in the holes, and painting the walls at Turner House. The afternoon was split into sorting out small diffusion sweet packets which will be inside the Diffusion Ffotomatic Machines, which are the festival’s vending machines. The other half was a meeting with Beca from Creative Cardiff, who’s holding the Makers’ Fair and what I’ll be getting involved with while working at Shift. I took notes throughout the meeting and got a good idea of what they’ll need, including tables and chairs, and made a list of it in a table, as seen below;

Diffusion Internship – Day 2

Today was visiting most of the other venues to have an idea of what needed to be done and the curation of the artworks. We first met at the Castle Street venue, where we discussed to not have a part of the space open to the public due to the leaking and damp. We also noted the bricks being a little loose, and that the public probably wouldn’t want to step inside. Therefore, the time and effort will be put into making the rest look fresh and prepped.

We also visited Shift, which is where I’ll be based when we really get going with the exhibitions and events. I saw how huge the space was, and immediately noted on my log book that I’ll need volunteers to help, as I’ll only get access to start working on the space after the 17th of March, not leaving me a lot of time to get it done. However, the artworks that’ll be exhibited there will be fantastic, and I’m really excited to get going. Naomi and I began listing everything we possibly will need for these pieces on Excel.

We also visited WMC and the Senedd, which will also hold exhibitions during the festival.

The afternoon was spent packing up all the pieces left at the gallery and going through all the stock Turner House already had, so that we can cross-reference what we needed at each of the venues to save having to buy more than we need. This took a lot of time, as we had a huge amount of items, but I think it was a great way of budgeting.

Bedwyr Williams

My gap crit lead me to research Bedwyr Williams’s performance at Frieze, which was based around food. He dissected a life-size curator made out of cake during a performance piece, complete with internal organs and covered in marzipan skin. This lead me to think about what materials I could be using in my performances, instead of sticking to clay. I think marzipan would be excellent to try out, as the images really look quite fleshy, and also have a very light-skinned look, correlating with the myth of Pygmalion perfectly. I’m currently planning a new performance in preparation for the final film for my end of year exhibition, where I plan on first using marzipan to see how well it’ll work.

Internship – Day 1

We spent today signing contracts and getting to grips with each of our responsibilities. Ayu, the intern and volunteer co-ord, explained all of the key dates and vaguely what we’ll need to do for each, and where we’ll be expected to be for the events.

We also spent the day at Penarth, at the Ffotogallery hub in Turner House Gallery. This time was spent going through ideas for how to organise feedback forms and how to engage the visitors to have them fill them out. I suggested we used a system of white boards to engage people, as they might find it more fun than only writing on paper. I also thought that two separate boxes near the entrance for people either put in a sad face *:(* or a happy face *:)* into to see if the visitors enjoyed their visit. The director, David Drake, seemed keen on these ideas.

The Turner House Gallery itself is a great place to exhibit, and I’m keen to find out how to exhibit there myself in the future. Even though Penarth is a little out of the way to see an exhibition if you’re from Cardiff, I’d really like to start branching out.

Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas has long experimented with her androgynous look with food. They range from her first photographic self portrait, Eating a Banana, 1990 to the more recent Human Toilet Revisited, 1998. Photographic self portraits have been an important element of Lucas’s work since the early 1990s. The seminal Eating a Banana changed Lucas’s perception of her ‘masculine’ appearance from being a disadvantage to being something she could use in her art. ‘I suddenly could see the strength of the masculinity about it – the usefulness of it to the subject struck me at that point, and since then I’ve used that’ (Lucas quoted in Barber, p.16). The resulting confrontational self portrait photographs, made throughout the 1990s, complement her sculptural and installation work. Through them she presents an identity which challenges stereotypical representations of gender and sexuality. Posing simultaneously as tough and abject, macho but female, she creates an image of defiant femininity.

Lucas appears in the macho pose she has claimed as her own. Clad in old jeans and heavy footwear, she sits with her legs wide apart and her feet planted firmly on the ground. Androgynous t-shirts and leather jackets feature in many of the images. In all these images her gaze back at the viewer is direct and uncompromising. Food representing or standing in for sexual body parts is a common theme in Lucas’s work, mainly employed to reveal and subvert degrading objectification of the body in vernacular language. Fried eggs feature as breasts in sculptural installations and cover Lucas’s own breasts in her Self Portrait with Fried Eggs. In Got a Salmon On #3 1997, Lucas stands outside a public toilet, a huge salmon resting from her shoulder to below her waist, a pun on the idea of a female erection. Summer 1998 portrays Lucas grimacing as she is sprayed with frothing beer. Like Eating a Banana and Lucas’s film, Sausage Film 1990, it satirises traditional female roles in pornography. These images present a female artist of masculine appearance as an object for male desire.

Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996

Au Naturel 1994 Mattress, water bucket, melons, oranges and cucumber 84 x 168 x 145 cm

Chicken Knickers 2000 C-print 273.2 x 196.3 cm

Eating a Banana, 1990

I really enjoy how Lucas has used the foods specifically to display sexual, and mostly feminine, body parts – I only wished I had seen these months ago. They capture what makes her feminine in the photographs, proving the foods sexual themes, as her appearance and manner capture the masculine aspect of the photograph. It begs the question of, why does masculinity get the mannerisms and aesthetic to represent it, while the femininity gets the objects to be consumed?