Degree Show Build – Day 4

I managed to get a lot done today, including all of the rest of the painting (mainly touch-ups), cleaning and scrubbing the floors, and placing most of the equipment inside the plinths.

I began the floor cleaning in sections, working my way around the plinths to make sure I didn’t create any marks with the browned water. Most of the paint was impossible to get off, but I did improve its state, and is looking much better than it previously did.

I also placed the plinths to about where I’ll be wanting them for the show. This lead to starting to carefully place everything inside. However, I did find out that the amplifiers didn’t fit inside, which is a shame, as I was really hoping they would. I also found that I forgot to cut holes into the bottom for the wires to come through and not disturb the plinth by making it wobbly, which is something I’ll have to quickly sort out next week with a tutor’s guidance. However, for now, I have a good idea of where the pieces will be placed, and will start drafting them out on the walls tomorrow.

I also signed up to invigilating during my lunch break for when the show starts for 4 shifts, which will certainly help towards my professional development.

Tomorrow will be for placing the plinths in correct positions, placing masking tape where needed to remember the positioning if they’re moved. I’ll be calculating this by measuring the length of the room, which I quickly did today before having to leave the building. It measures 4 meters and 80cm, and will have to include all of the plinths, which are 35cm in width X 4. This means that I’ll have to subtract 140cm from the room measurement and divide by 5 spaces. This means that there should be roughly 68cm gap between all spaces.

Diffusion Uninstall – Day 2

This wasn’t meant to be the last day uninstalling Shift, but we all pulled together and worked hard to get everything done ahead of schedule. We first added a new layer of paint onto the once black walls, pillars, and made sure that the floors were cleared of objects like screws or nails. We then started to take everything out of the Bootlegger Apartment box that was built, which was the last instalment left from Diffusion. We individually wrapped every object as they were from the Soviet Era and were extremely delicate. We did this by using bubble-wrap and masking tape, and were all individually labelled and put into sectioned boxes. We then unscrewed the walls and structure. Thankfully, Shift wanted to keep all the wood, therefore we only had to stack them up. We then loaded the van to Turner House with everything that was left, including books, tea urn, chairs, etc. This was the final thing needed to do, and I’ll be extremely sad to leave Shift and to have seen it all come down, but I’m happy to now fully concentrate on my own degree show build.

Rumblestrip / Love Hangover

Rumblestrip brings together works by six artists that carry a sense that something is not going right, that there are signs we should be heeding. They find the differences between subsequence and consequence, a link made between things happened or happening and things yet to come. They pull together precedent and prediction, the unreachable past and an uncertain future, pointing to the signs and signals that things are about to change, there are other paths than the ones we are currently treading.

A rumble-strip is the line of ridged road paint on the side of motorways, there to alert drivers to danger, to wake the sleep-deprived and to prevent accidents. It is a warning, a noise, a difference that signals a deviation, a change in direction.

All of the artists in the show and in the associated programme make works that exist in this unsettling moment of change. Emanuel Almborg has made a parallel between two different points in history and location – documenting a youth theatre project that deals with the Rebecca Riots in Wales and the London riots of 2011 to trace patterns in repression and revolt. Nooshin Farhid, working with Paul Eachus, has produced a film propped up on a structure of another film tracking a bullet sailing through a street, searching for its own point of impact somewhere between being fired and finding its target. This scene is neither the past or the present. It’s a layer of both, an unsettling present, a simulation. James Moore describes his paintings as being “like levels from a non-existent game” they seek to picture something tangible, conjured up from our culture’s obsession with these simulations and fiction.

The fear of being forgotten has given Paula Morison’s work an edginess. An archived catalogue of natural disasters and a countdown that is also counting up. Rather than a march toward the end this is a focus toward a mid-point where days still to come outnumber the days that have passed. Paul Eastwood uses video, writing and drawing as a way of conjuring things into existence. He views and frames art as a social production and cultural storytelling. He performs with and amongst the objects to act out their potential narrative meanings and functions. He is concerned with displaced fragments – of language, of artefacts and of culture – and how they take on new meanings. In her film Hill of Dreams 2016, Jessica Warboys draws from Welsh fantasy writer Arthur Machen’s book of the same name that relives his memories of rural Gwent, where Warboys was born a century later. An edited cut between ancient landscapes and contemporary objects that appear and vanish offers us a set of patterns to decipher, or a conjuring trick to contemplate.

Alongside Rumblestrip, a project by Tom Cardew is also showing, who has worked with g39 over the last year to develop a new installation. In a space that looks like a gallery store, a series of linked narratives are played by computer generated avatars. Dishevelled and not quite of now, they are ghosts. Their voices and stories stand out as distinctly human, as they go off on tangents, stumble over words and forget what they are discussing, drifting from sense to nonsense. The group gabble on, seemingly disconnected and separate, before starting to sync up as a choir.

Using digital techniques, comedic performance, song and an elaborately disorienting installation, Tom’s work at g39 explores modes of communication and the levels of understanding – and mis-understanding – that occur on social media platforms. The work is presented in a space that is usually not open to the public, leading you through store cupboards and out of date technology, projector screens and cardboard boxes. This passage leads you to what looks like the reverse of a wooden theatre stage set before opening out into a room full of screens.

The same CGI face peers out from each screen, but seems to be unaware of you, or of the other identical faces as the multitude of tired, ventriloquised masculine avatars mumble, shout and rant trying to get a word in edgeways.

Degree Show Build – Day 3

I wanted to concentrate on getting most of the painting done today, including the plinths and walls. In order to do this, I needed to sand the filler down I had used in the morning in preparation for a smoother surface to paint on. The nails I had found under the paint on the walls slowed this process down, as the sanding I did had resurfaced them. This meant that I had to take my time to get them out, but this was difficult due to how deep they all were.

I also had the help of my first year helper, Sadie Mansfield, which was great because she painted a few plinths while I painted my walls, then I helped her finish off the plinths. This meant that the only painting I had left was the touch-ups.

However, I was pleased that I was able to do all of this in a day, which will certainly help me crack on with the curation of the piece next week.

Dissemination of my work

I’ve chosen to disseminate my work both through the internet, including social media, linkedin, a website, and through submitting my work to an association in Cardiff. Both have worked tremendously well in getting my art our there, but in very different ways. My Instagram for my art, or “sarasfineart”, has offered me countless networking opportunities, where I’ve followed an artist or a person in the creative industry, and they’ve reached out to me, for example;

Thomas Williams worked for Artes Mundi 8, and has been a Wales in Venice invigilator twice, and offered for me to speak to Wiil Gompertz during Artes Mundi 8.

I post on my Instagram often, showing my followers what I’ve been up to recently in my projects; both at university and outside university. The link to my profile is:

https://www.instagram.com/sarasfineart/

Our third year course also has an Instagram page that lets its following know of events that we are organising, including fundraising events and exhibitions, and I was recently displayed on by sending my artwork to it with a few sentences about my practice;

I have also been included onto the csadinc (https://www.instagram.com/csadinc/) and metcaerdydd (https://www.instagram.com/metcaerdydd/) page numerous times for my work in the Cardiff art scene, which has been great for showing whoever follows the pages that I’m an active member and keen to dive into opportunities.

I’ve also had a Wix webisite up and running since graduating at Coleg Menai for my Art Foundation course back in 2016, and have been using it since. It has a link to my WordPress account, videos and links to current works, and even a shop if anyone’s interested in buying my pieces.

Link to my website; http://sarasfineart.wixsite.com/website

What I’ve recently been keen to do is getting my work displayed in events that coincide with my practice. A great opportunity to do this was applying to display work at Llanover Hall in Cardiff with the Women’s Art Association, who are holding an exhibition in celebration of International Women’s Day. I also helped set this exhibition up, which meant that I could speak with all of the WAA leaders, and network. They will also be supporting my collaborative exhibition with two other students. The exhibition itself is on the theme of Women’s Empowerment and will be held at G39.

My LinkedIn profile has been great at kick-starting my creative career in Cardiff. My profile has lots of information concerning qualifications, skills, work experience, and interests. My skills were acknowledged for my time with Ffotogallery as an intern for the Diffusion Festival by David Drake, the director of Ffotogalllery;

Exhibition Proposal

The fetishisation of food has become a hugely important aspect of my practice. The playful and flirtatious nature of eating on camera for an audience to document the sexualised 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, mainly using performance and film. I have challenged the use of fruit emojis as representations of the female body, such as cherries and peaches, and created a series of films documenting my transformation into these specific fruits, which have been inspired by ORLAN’s body modifications.

These are shown through projections of my body going through these failing transformations. I have used a combination of marzipan for its fleshy consistency, and fruit for a grotesque and bloodied effect to make cherry breasts and peachy bums and used the left-overs of these performances as pieces in their own right. These pieces are displayed as relief objects to project my films onto and morph my body further, emphasising the transformations.

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 it is predominantly aimed at women’s bodies.

I have aimed to document a series of performances through film and then displaying the films through projections onto pieces from the performance, and also use blocks of colours and a series of flashbacks to represent the fruits and themes I have used, for example, orange for peaches. This will take me a month to prepare and build, as I have to rent the equipment and order items, such as USBs. I have also prepared key dates for things that will need assistance, such as plinth making over the Easter break, enabling me enough time during the two week degree show build.

I needed assistance with setting up audio/projector equipment by either Mal Bennett or Neil Pedder, and hanging up the pieces being displayed. I have also built four plinths to put my projectors inside, pointing towards the hanging pieces, which will need assistance by Nigel Williams. I will also regularly meet up with a technician during the build to ensure everything is going smoothly and that I’m meeting regulations.

In order to project my films, I’ve enquired a darker room. I would preferably need somewhere that people could see both my 3D pieces and my projections on top of them, however the projector’s brightness have sufficiently done this without any natural or extra artificial lighting.  I’ve made numerous diagrams on Google Sketch up and a few sketches in my sketchbook to make it easier to see what I’m aiming for, and have constantly changed with research, practice, and enquiring with tutors and technicians;

My most recent ones are below, which more accurately show what I’ve decided to use for curational purposes;

I budgeted a £100 for everything, including USBs, wood, paint, marzipan, food, and have kept a spreadsheet to keep track of everything;

It all came to £103.60, which is only very slightly over budget, therefore I’m happy with this outcome.

Diffusion – Uninstall Day 1

Today was an early start to make sure everything was done in time for the weekend. We started by putting down the cinema, stage, and stacking all the huge pieces of wood on the side, including the benches and cupboards we built for the gallery. This took a lot of time and effort, and required constant moving, concentrating, and working, since a slip-up could result in hurting yourself or another very easily.

My job after doing this was to pack up all of the artworks individually, using bubble wrap and tape, then placing them carefully into storage boxes. The mover van then came in the afternoon, which meant that everything had to be packed ready for this, which they were. We then loaded the van and began the paint job straight after. The painting won’t be as long this time, as a few walls won’t be up for the uninstall, and we won’t have to paint all walls – only the ones we painted black.

Villanelle in Killing Eve

Killing Eve is a cat and mouse series about Eve and Villanelle, written by Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Villanelle uses the gendered way people perceive her to her own advantage. An elderly Tuscan target mistakes her for a sex worker he’s expecting. She gets into a bathroom to kill a French politician by telling a male member of staff that she has been instructed to bring ‘madame’ a tampon. Villanelle plays up her femininity to throw people off her scent, wearing a hot-pink chiffon meringue of a dress to a psychological assessment.

Eve and Villanelle each have a man close to them in a professional context: for Eve it is her co-worker Bill, for Villanelle her handler Konstantin. What first looks like a potentially sexist and casually abrasive relationship between Eve and Bill, in which he is uncomfortable working below a woman, softens and expands into one of believable support. Bill is, in fact, not a misogynist but a queer working father whom we see carrying his baby during a “childcare emergency”, seemingly a routine part of his life. Villanelle has the upper hand in her relationship with Konstantin, whom she manipulates by infantilising herself in order to control his sympathies. Both these relationships are explicitly non-sexual, which is important, because all of the sexual tension in Killing Eve is between women.

A number of Villanelle’s past and present women partners appear in the series, and the attraction between Eve and the woman she’s hunting is unquestionably the focus of the show, making the old 007 trope – glamorous bombshell falls in lust with dashing spy – seem deeply uninteresting. On Twitter, Emily Nussbaum argued that Villanelle might be uncomfortably close to the clichéd figure of the lesbian psycho/killer, à la Basic Instinct. Yes, there’s undeniably a link drawn between her sexuality and her drive to kill – she murdered a lover’s male ex by cutting off his penis. But, as elsewhere in Killing Eve, things are more nuanced than they first appear. Eve is not a helpless straight women being hunted by a lesbian predator; she is as willing a participant in the sexual frisson between them as Villanelle is. 

Other moments that ignore the rules of a patriarchal series are;

• As soon as Villanelle starts romancing her puppyish neighbour, we suspect it will end with murder. And not long after being introduced to sweet, mixtape-making Sebastian, it comes to pass. In a cunning reversal of “fridging”, a horribly sexist trope in which female characters are sacrificed in the service of plot, Sebastian sniffs Villanelle’s homemade perfume (laced with top notes of poison, naturally) and carks it. Murder doesn’t get more ironically feminine than that.

• Killing Eve’s most distressing murder, and that’s saying something in a series in which castration is a signature, begins with a classic man-follows-woman scene. Except the man is Bill, who is lovely, brings his baby to meetings and must therefore die. And the woman is Villanelle. The setting is Berlin, with Bill tracking his prey through the streets at night, unaware that the mouse is stalking the cat. They end up in a nightclub where Villanelle flashes Bill a disturbing smile on the packed dancefloor, the place where many a woman has been groped. She chases him then stabs him to death, no doubt keeping perfect time with the techno.
• Double standards dictate that when a woman covets nice things on screen she is shallow and materialistic (Sex and the City) and when a man does the exact same thing, he is a sartorial sex god (James Bond). Enter Villanelle, who lives in a Parisian apartment worthy of a Vogue shoot, has a fridge stuffed with champagne and sends the women she fancies and/or intends to kill French couture. In essence, she’s the kind of psychopath who gets the name of the designer who made her victim’s throw before stabbing him in the eye with her hairpin. Like a host of terrifying men before her, she is also controlling, instructing Eve to wear her hair down and complete an outfit with a particular belt. Nice (creepy) touch.

• Bathroom brawls don’t tend to end well for women. It’s either a classic Psycho situation or Glenn Close drowned 50 times in the tub in Fatal Attraction. But, in an explosive episode entitled Dinner Date, in which agent and killer come face to face in Eve’s apartment, when the action moves to the bathroom it quickly descends from horror to … hilarity. Villanelle turns the tap on Eve’s head to stop her from screaming. Then comes the explanation for her visit: “I just want to have dinner with you.”

• In Killing Eve, it is the grizzled male handler, Konstantin, who is unnerved by his uncontrollable female charge. “Letting yourself into my apartment and drinking from a tiny cup doesn’t make you intimidating, by the way,” Villanelle says with a winning smile when he pitches up at her place … to intimidate her. The role reversal reaches its apotheosis when Villanelle throws a really weird birthday party for him, although it’s not his birthday, and in a wickedly feminist sleight of hand comes dressed as … Konstantin.

 

Amy in Gone Girl

Flynn: “For me, [feminism is] also the ability to have women who are bad characters … the one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing. In literature, they can be dismissably bad – trampy, vampy, bitchy types – but there’s still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad and selfish … I don’t write psycho bitches. The psycho bitch is just crazy – she has no motive, and so she’s a dismissible person because of her psycho-bitchiness.”

Monstrous women have often been portrayed as something that must be stopped at any cost, and whoever stops the monster, usually a man, is then the hero, even if the person who created the monstrous woman is a man. Popular cinema and art have also mostly concentrated on the phallic woman as a strong feminine character, however, could this indeed be a problematic notion? Perhaps a woman using her yonic power, even if it is for monstrous reasons, could very well be more empowering to women. We clearly see this theory unfold in the tale of Medusa, where Poseidon rapes the virginial Priestess she previously was, and Athena curses her out of jealousy when she finds out. Men then sought her out, but not because of her beauty, but to kill her, and Perseus is crowned the hero for doing so (Leeming, 2013). Contemporary versions of the monstrous woman, such as Amy Dunne in Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” (2012), who is changed throughout her life to be the ideal woman by her parents and the men in her life, including her husband, contrasts Medusa’s story by not ever being stopped (Flynn, 2012). This change is similar to Medusa’s curse, as Amy now does not know fully who she really is. Throughout the book and film adaptation, Amy displays psychopathic tendencies, frames her fake murder on her husband, and even kills a previous boyfriend. Amy Dunne and Medusa’s characters beg the question whether if monstrous women can have valid feminist points and messages, since they are perhaps only monstrous from being a product of a patriarchal society.

Unlike Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Medusa is stopped through death, whereas Amy wins. Even only with reference to the Vagina Dentata in Medusa’s snake hair we see how her myth will end because, as Creed points, the threat of castration must go, as the myth “generally states that women are terrifying because they have teeth in their vaginas and that the women must be tamed, or the teeth somehow removed or softened – usually by a hero figure – before intercourse can safely take place” (Creed, 1993, pg1), and once again, the hero was Perseus, reaffirming phallic power. Amy Dunne’s husband, Nick Dunne, tries to stop her after figuring out she is trying to frame him for her fake murder, but we quickly realise that he is no hero figure, just as we realise Perseus is not for slaying the ‘monster’ Medusa had become. This parallels with Amy Dunne’s character because it is the rules of being a woman, or “Amazing Amy” whom her parents had made into children’s books based on her, that pushed her to have a psychotic episode. Although most of what Amy Dunne wrote in her diary about him to portray Nick as a terrible person was false, he was still having an affair with a younger “cool girl” and had made Amy feel invisible in their marriage (Flynn, 2012). This was enough of a motive to break free from the “cool girl” persona she had been pressured to live all her life and become truly monstrous, which parallels with the monstrous mother in Sherman’s piece. She fakes her own death and intelligently frames her husband for it, leaving behind “clues” to his involvement in the “murder”. She then comes across trouble during her escape and must ask a pervious boyfriend, who is obsessive over her, for help. She then fakes assaults by him using cameras around his home and then kills him just as he reaches climax during intercourse using a box knife, signifying using her vagina as a luring weapon for this murder, and thus feminising the use of the knife she uses to kill. This penetration using a possible phallic object is also a total gender reversal, with his neck being the penetrated vagina. This almost links to the ‘normal’ arrangement of women in horror because “they frame the vagina as vulnerable” (Harrington, 2017, pg7) but with a twist; she is using this vulnerability of being a supposed victim to manipulate the media and police, as well as the people in her life. Horror also uses the vagina “as a site of terror” (Harrington, 2017, pg7), where Amy Dunne has used this vulnerability against people, particularly males.