Deconstruction

I have been trying to 'build' a nude body with the images of myself that I made with a scanner last week as I haven't had access to a studio to shoot photographs with a model of body parts to use. I spent a long time cropping individual fingers, eyes and lips to arrange into something that resembles a body, but I feel like it looks like something that would've been made 25 years ago when artists were just starting to use Photoshop. I don't want to worry too much about being original and contemporary because that could stop me from creating something great, but sometimes you have to take a step back and ask yourself whether the piece you're working on is actually going anywhere. Also I think using a programme like Photoshop can lead to overcomplicating a piece and ending up with a big mess.

To refresh the work I'm creating with the scans, I created rectangular frame in which I placed a few parts of the scans of my mouth, and blended them together using the 'spot healing' tool on Photoshop.  I did the same with images of my fingers. For a while I thought I might leave the pieces like this, but still wanted to tie these new images into the ideas I have been looking at surrounding the human form. From found imagery I traced female figures and cut out the silhouettes from plain sheets of white printing paper and stuck these over the collages of my mouth and fingers. If viewed from a certain angle, the silhouette cut-outs form shadows over the prints of the collages which gives the final images three-dimensionality, which I would like them to have if they were to be displayed in an exhibition space. I like photography pieces to have an unexpected physical presence in a space, because it breaks the two-dimensional barrier that photography is often stuck behind.

In contemporary art the frame has become simpler, or non-existent because frames are no longer so commonly used to create the illusion of another world, but simply to protect what's in them. Pinning photographs to walls and displaying canvases without frames has become common practice in galleries as the function of the frame becomes more questionable.

In my mouth by me

Fingers by me