Testing Projection

Projector displaying the film of my mouth 

Filming my mouth

While filming my mouth I have found that the lens gets steamed up if I breathe on it. At first I was filming short clips of about 20-30 seconds that could be edited together to make one longer film, however later decided to film longer takes of about 3 minutes, so that the film wouldn't be broken up so much because it could distract from the feel of the installation. At first I didn't want the lens to be steamed at all as it distorts the recorded image, however now I am shooting longer takes, I'm considering using it to my advantage as another sensory element of the film.
Watching a tightly cropped film of my tongue and lips moving around is quite sickening, so much so that I can't bring myself to watch it with sound yet, although I need to so that I can work out whether I can use the sound on the film or re-record it. It's difficult to look at my own mouth for such a long time, particularly as I am quite squeamish about saliva and mouth noises. This work is kind of a method of perhaps getting rid of some of that squeamishness, or just a way of exploiting it.

Mouth Piece

Using the collaged scans of my mouth, I created a sort of wallpaper. I stuck multiple copies of the collage to a wall in my kitchen, and invited a few friends round to discuss the piece and pose in front of it. The initial reaction from most was that it was quite funny, or that they couldn't work out what it was; one girl asking if it was the prints were of bacon. We discussed that the piece would be far more effective if the edges of each print lines up so that the overall look was seamless, or what it would be like if the image was projected onto the wall. If the image were to be projected onto the wall, it would inevitably also be projected onto whoever was standing within the space. At the time I wasn't sure how I felt about the idea of using projections, because it would make the work feel all-consuming.

Joseph in front of my mouth

After a taking a few days away from the work, focussing on other projects, I came back to it thinking about creating a small, intimate space with the walls covered in this image. I fixed the print in Photoshop so that all the edges would match up, making it possible to use as wallpaper. In a group tutorial it was suggested that I could even have photographs of someone wearing a T-shirt with the same print on it in the space. We discussed how much more powerful the piece when the viewer gets to experience it themselves, rather than just seeing photographs of it, so I decided that the final outcome of this investigation will be an installation of sorts. 

Thinking about how to make the piece more sensory for the viewer I came back to the idea of using a projection, not just of a still image, but of a video. In my imagination, the video will be grotesque and a little disgusting. My friends and I mess about sending these sorts of gross videos of our mouths to each other on our phones, but I have never considered what it could become on a larger scale. With a phone camera you can get really close up and even inside the mouth, but using a video camera with a regular sized lens would restrict how intimate the imagery recorded can be. Considering image quality I will initially try using a video camera, and hold using a phone camera as a back-up for now. 

Photograms

The idea of photograms may seem simple, but they can raise some interesting questions in relation to photography and form. The photogram as an analogon of the objects that created it. "The photographic image is a message without a code". Other messages without a code (cinema, theatre, paintings, drawings), however they develop a supplementary meaning in their reproduction of reality. The treatment of the image signifies the second meaning, whether aesthetic or ideological (A Barthes Reader - A Photographic Message)

Floris Neusüss
"By removing objects from their physical context, Neusüss encourages the viewer to contemplate the essence of form. His photograms create a feeling of surreal detachment"
With practice, the photogram can be a sophisticated way to record an image, exploring texture through the transparency of your chosen objects.

Floris Neusüss 'Untitled', Berlin, 1962

I began creating photograms using lemons and watermelon, which had strange feeling to them somewhere between natural and synthetic. Although these fruits are natural, a human presence was evident because they had been sliced. The juice from the lemons left marks on the photogram which I was considering using as a pattern in a drawing, like a Japanese print. However, the lemon juice proved too difficult to control, so I returned to more still-life compositions. Creating a line drawing, however, I could do because I had a reel of black thread. I allowed the thread to fall freely onto the paper at first, cutting it at points when it had created a strong form. I quickly progressed to creating type with the thread, but this looked too clumsy, so reverted to composing abstract forms on the paper. As I was creating these compositions, I placed small beads onto the paper, at first opaque ones, then glass beads to get the effect of a hollow circle. These arrangements of odd lines and dots had a slight resemblance to the work of Joan Miró. Similarly to Miró's paintings, certain motifs were reappearing in each photogram.

The "Constellations" are the most precisely executed of all Miró's works. They grew out of reflections in water, showing how Miró could transform an observation of nature into a "cosmic realism". In this series of paintings various motifs (Moon, Sun, comets, eyes, insects, birds and women) would reappear, coexisting in a natural, harmonious order. André Breton said of the works: "They differ from and resemble each other... taken together in their progression and in their totality, each of them assumes the necessity and value of a component in a mathematical system." May 1941 Miró flees a German occupied France for Mallorca, where he continues work on the 23 Constellations, and finished them later that year in Mont-roig, his Catalonian home.

Joan Miró 'Ciphers and Constellations, in Love with a Woman', 1941

The photograms look to me like broken constellations, as if the black background were the night sky and the beads the stars, but the thread is unable to link the stars to create recognisable shapes. I tried not to think about this too much, as I risked over complicating the pieces.

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

The ideas for my body of work have started to towards the representation of the body. Naturally I look at this from the perspective of a woman, therefore I've been tending to think of the male gaze on the female body. However, I'd like to not narrow my research to just looking at the female figure, because I'm also interested in the female gaze on both the male body and female body. I would like to think that, in my circle of friends at least, the "recurring theme of male disgust at female sexuality"*  isn't nearly as prevalent as it was maybe 10 years ago. I don't think it's "cool" to have such narrow minded views these days and to me it's not something worth arguing about, because maybe if we stop talking about how gross boys think we are, and start talking about how it's okay to be 'gross', this negative opinion will go away. Maybe I'm being very naive but I think telling boys off for calling girls disgusting is a self fulfilling prophecy.

*- Matthew Collins "Sarah Lucas" Tate Publishing, 2002.

Assemblage

Scanning myself really drew attention to the two extremes of accuracy and inaccuracy than can be achieved when scanning a three dimensional form. The images hold a surreal quality, given by the short focal length of the scanner. To advance from what I've done over the last couple of days today I plan to use scans of individual parts of the body to build up an image of an artificial figure.

Through my work I am hoping to question the structure of society's views on the human figure by investigating the difference between nudity and nakedness. Physically and visually these two states may be exactly the same, however the intent, concept and conscious states - of the artist, model or viewer - are arguably very different. If you look up the definitions of the two words there is a distinct difference. 'Naked' not only means to be without clothes (or usual covering or protection), and being undisguised, but it also expresses an exposure to harm and vulnerability. The definition of 'nude' on the other hand refers more to the depiction of the bare human form in an artistic context ("a naked human figure, typically as the subject of a painting, sculpture or photograph"/ "depicting or performed by naked people"). The fact that the definition of nude that I found used the word "naked" suggests that nudity is a form of nakedness with artistic intent. So what does it then mean to simply be naked?

Freya Jobbins is an Australian sculptor and print maker who primarily uses discarded childrens' toys to assemble busts and portraits, exploring the relationship between consumerism and the culture of up-cycling and recycling. Jobbins arranges the parts of the toys in such a way that the expressions and body language the sculptures posses can be quite particular. I am really interested in the process of creating a humanoid sort of nude figure with images of inexplicit parts of the body. The fact that the parts of the body which the figure is made up of are not explicit should, in a literal sense, mean that the figure isn't nude, however, if I create all the visible forms of the nude figure, is it then nude? Is it naked?

I think it's interesting that traditionally we would think of 'a nude' as a figurative artwork, whether that be painted, sculptural or in the form of a photographic print, and that although some of these may have been somewhat erotic, and perhaps shocking at the time they were made, but generally they are not frowned upon. However, the accessibility of cameras has created a boom in the production of images, and photography has been put into the hands of all members of society. Over the last couple of decades or so, 'a nude', in pop culture has come to obtain another meaning. Generally it is known as a photograph taken by oneself, of oneself, nude. And typically these pictures are shared with lovers, and in some cases 'leaked' (meaning the someone obtained and shared the photograph without the owner's permission). Leaking nudes has been all over the press this year with many celebrities taking the hit. The victims of this, now, crime used to commonly be the first ones to be slated, being condemned for creating nude photographic images of themselves, but recently we have seen a huge shift in the from the victim being blamed, to the criminal being blamed. Laws have been written against the act of 'revenge porn' and some activists have started to leak their own nudes in an effort to 'reclaim their bodies'. See: Molly Soda and Alexandra Marzella (@artits6666).

Freya Jobbins sculpture