Category: General

Summative Assessment – ADZ6333 Consolidation

Artist Statement

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.

Documentation

Painting Developments

Grotesque Performance, Film, and Images

Gap Crit Turning Point

Contextualisation

Women as Consumables

The Use of Characters in Feminist Art

The Grotesque Female

 

Assessment Feedback Tutorial

James was really helpful for my feedback, and assured me that I didn’t need to do anything more for my professional development as it’s on the very top end of excellent, except to perhaps look into the inc space, and to just get on with my artwork, which is definitely underway. I described everything I had already done since the assessment, including my booked plinth workshop on Thursday, the projectors and speakers I’ve booked, and what I had left to look for. James seemed happy with this progression, and advised me to play around with the curating of my pieces, and to also document every decision I make and the process behind it. James also advised me to think carefully about the positioning of the speakers to ensure they won’t clutter the space up at all, which I’ll definitely bare in mind when I start setting up.

Assessment – 14th December

Personal Statement

Assessment Personal Statement 14/12

Documentation

Painting myself as a Camera Girl

Fruit machine – developing the emoji idea for food as a fetish

Final Fruit Machine Painting

Contextualisation

Maria Lassnig

Critical debates: Sexism, Censorship and Politics in Manchester

Megan Winstone and Red Flannel Films Talk at g39

Booster Week Posts

Booster week 15/10

Booster week 16/10

Setting up my account on MyFreeCams – Booster week 17/10

Volunteering for “Sock it to me” by Janet Blackman – booster week 18/10

Going live on MyFreeCams for the first time to eat a banana – booster week 18/10

Booster week – 19/10

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.

Personal statement

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 prostitution or anything that could potentially bring any harm or be insensitive, and thought that making a profile as a camera girl would work much better. 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 YouTube? In my opinion, not hugely, and the comments would not have been as crude and obviously sexual as I wanted them to be for the purpose of my work. This also fed into the Mukbang fetish I have been researching into, which is usually a young and very slim girls eating a to large amount of food on camera, which potentially could advertise binge-eating and unhealthy food relationships, which could be an interesting thing to carefully develop.

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 translate 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.

I could even look into buying an old fruit machine and change it to emojis, and see what I can come up with, but this could prove to be difficult if it is a big machine.

Final Assessment

Personal Statement 

Final Exhibition Personal Statement

Documentation

My ideas and pieces leading up to my final piece

Site Venue exhibitions

Technical skills I have learnt and developed from Relational Colour

My Final Piece

Documenting responses to my performance

Contextualisation 

Davida’s ‘Failiure’ Lecture – 19/02/18

Annie Sprinkle – “Public Cervix Announcement”

Ways of Exhibiting – how artists display and disseminate their work

Women in Focus – National Museum Cardiff

Lynn Hershman Lesson

My Field Experience 

Evaluation of my Field experience

Final Exhibition Personal Statement

After visiting Venice back in October, I decided to work with the drawing I saw by Huguette Caland titled Self Portrait (1971). I began by drawing it in my sketchbook, then started to alter it until I was making many organic-looking vagina drawings. At the same time, I began making shaped paintings of the drawings, but none were showing my ideas the way I wanted them to. Therefore I decided to carry on drawing, reading and researching into feminism and vaginas until I knew exactly what I wanted to do with these drawings. I then decided to use clay a lot more, since it enabled me to make organic-looking pieces by being delicate like leaves and petals, but with the texture of a vagina. I made a large shaped painting based off of the idea of the ‘designer vagina’ where women get cosmetic surgery to remove ‘excess’ labia. I painted it a red-pink colour, then by accident, I took a picture of it at an angle that made it look like a rose. Because of this, I began making many clay vaginas that resemble flowers or other plants from my drawings and took pictures of them from angles that emphasised their organic look. This is mostly to add humour to a fairly serious topic of how women face pressure of having a good looking vagina, when they come in all shapes, thus comparing  them to something as natural as flowers that are all unique, and in a way that is only seen from certain angles, offers my opinion on the matter. Comparing vaginas to flowers is also historically a very famous metaphor, and often a sexist one. For example, we often hear about men ‘de-flowering’ women (taking their virginity), which certainly has negative connotations, implying a change and impurity to the women who’ve been sexually active.

I’ve also touched on this work in my Site Venue project, by taking photographs of myself modelling a vagina piece I’ve made as a performance Red Light District worker. I’m very interested in how the women are treated there and the constant laws that are changing to ensure their safety and respect, such as not letting tourists look and bother them for amusement. I was also keen on how an audience of people, such as my instagram following, would react if I released a series of similar scenes of the District. I also photoshopped a ‘peeking Tom’ through my window to make the series of photos blatantly humerous art pieces, making the negative reactions I received even more interesting. I’ll be looking into making more work like this in the future, as I really like the idea of developing my work by using them as ‘props’ in photographs, almost making the pictures a part of a performance piece. Using myself as the object came from looking into Cindy Sherman’s work at the beginning of the year, especially at her Untitled series, where she explores the male gaze, a concept theorised by Laura Mulvey in 1975. Sherman’s utilisation of the male gaze is complex: in one sense she diverts her passivity by being both the looker and the looked at, but in another way she consistently re-establishes the gaze by playing the victim or sexualised object. The “Untitled Film Still #6” (below), taken in 1977, Sherman exposes herself in her underwear, holding a mirror in one hand as she dons her usual emotionless expression. While the image is clearly sexualised, Sherman also demonstrates how femininity is a disguise, a performance, and then so too becomes the commander of the gaze. I want to almost recreate this idea by using myself as a sexual object, as I’ll certainly be in the cubicle for the male gaze, but I’ll also be fully in control of what is seen and my safety, something I believe sex workers lack the right of in the UK.