Author: Jamie-xaviere

Doris Salcedo is a sculptor and visual artist from Colombia. Much of her work is inspired by her expericnces in colombia and frequently has themes that deal with historical incidents of trauma, racism , mass violence and more. With her work, she sees herself as a witness and belives that her art symbolises a social conscience.

her sculptures are moslty made up of everyday objects such as clothing, concrete, plants and wooden furniture, which are place in such a werid space or position. the thing that peaked my intrerest in Doris Salcedos work is the agongy they induce. looking at photos of her work creates a type of discomfrot in me. Normally with sculptures, they tend to give us peace when we gaze upon them but Doris challenges that and creates installations that give off dread in the most wildest setup and space.

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This was a fun ide in my head but when it actually came to me doing it, it was struggle and i nearly snapped my foot while doing one of the poses. we were given the task to create 8 one-minute poses inspired by Erwin Wurn. i tried something different with this one, instead of collecting a variety of objects I stuck to 2-3 objects and tried to see how many poses i could get out of them.

It was a challenge trying to figure out how i could build the objects on myself without making them look too out of place. i looked into how i could balance, wear and hold my choosen ojects. In the end i really liked the wrapping method i had going on in one of the photos and tried to present that method more but at the same time making sure each pose is different.

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overall the outcome of this doesn’t really fit or match with Erwin Wurn works but I think the idea is still there which is combining people and objects to create an unusual sculpture.

starting off the new brief Verisimilitude we were asked to create one mintue scupltures inspired by Erwin Wuran. Erwin Wurn is a Austrian artist who works across several media like photography , scupture and performce art, Wth his one minute Wurn added a unqine spin on the medium of sculpting . Wurn welcomes audince participation and interaction in these perfoances in order to rethink this medium. He captures people engaging in werid poses holding or wearing eveyday items in an unconventional way. He manges to turn a regular person into a art pieace just by following his instructions and the outcome is aslways different.

In his other sculptural work, he explores the idea of representation in a fun manner. He examines the various possibilities of an object by focusing on familiar objects and presenting them in a fresh way. By twisting and warping ordinary, recognised objects in his sculptures, Wurm is able to transform reality.

these are my final works. I picked these because of their size (roughly A2 except for the tiny one ) and also how funky they look. I do believe this work achieves the aim of this brief which is ‘process to image’. The whole point is allowing the paint to do its own thing while also asking yourself where should it go next or which area needs it. You go through this process of creating a mark which then becomes an image that you can either make more clear or leave as it is for another person to perceive instead of you.

I struggled a bit in this brief especially during the lockdown period. since we were in lockdown the teachers weren’t alot around so I couldn’t get their opinion on what I could do or what I shouldn’t do to my work. I think if I were to do this brief again I would give the whole face idea thing a try and stretch that idea further and see where it leads me.

I came across an artist named Melanie Rothschild and she has this art series called ‘Paint and Air’. the series came from a mistake she made where she spilled paint on the floor and instead of cleaning it up she let it dried then cane back later to peel it off the ground, and the whole thing peeled off in one piece which lead her to pick up this craft of spilling paint.

the way she presents her artwork is interesting, she hangs the dried peeled paint up on a line and lets it dangle, which creates the illusion of a painted waterfall.

I wanna go down a similar route, having my work up on a wall as if it was there, to begin with. the method that I went with was kinda different from Melanie Rothschild. I taped up a plastic sheet on my wall and starting dripping my paint mixture on it. the first try went bad but the more I look the more I like it. pouring the paint on the plastic sheet compared to a floor seems better since the paint peeled off the plastic really easily compared to the floor. I’m still contemplating whether I should draw faces or keep them blank for others to perceive.

I used all the paper that I had to complete my minor work so now I don’t have any left for my studio work but this could be a blessing because now I’m starting to think that maybe the work that I’m doing would look better off the paper. the spill can be the object.

I also came across two problems the first one is I’m having trouble figuring out how I’m going to present the work since the spill is no longer on paper. the second is that I’m starting to think that maybe I should drop the face idea and present the spills blank. in my previous post, I talked about wanting the viewer to bring together their own image in their head when they look at my piece. I think leaving them blank would be way better than me showing the viewer the faces that I see in the spill, cause everyone is different and we all perceive things differently.

I still need to figure out how to display the spills though.

we went into lockdown this month which was a major problem for me because a big chunk of my equipment was at the studio. I didn’t have a lot of paint and I ordered a couple of stuff but was never given the confirmation email. in the end, I didn’t have alot of the materials that I needed so I held back on making alot of acrylic pours until I had a very good idea of what I was going to do for my final piece of work.

I did a bit more research for my work. I looked at the Rorschach test which is an inkblot test of different shapes and colors and is presented to a person, who is asked to describe what they suggest or resemble.

this fits into what I’m going for cause I want whoever is going to view the work to bring together their own image in their head and not just go off of the faces that I’m presenting to them, like in the previous works that I’ve done.

one of the artists I looked at was Hannah Ireland.

Hannah Ireland is an emerging artist from Tamaki Makaurau New Zealand. Her work centers around making portraits that all have emotions to them, sad, hurt and confused, or confident. Ireland’s artworks consider how we construct, revise and reassemble our images to suit different needs, different contexts, different people. the main thing that caught my eye with her work is the exaggerated facial features on the portraits. The messiness of it all reminds me of the idea I had from the beginning about making something that looks unidentifiable from afar but close up you start noticing things.

the next pieces of work I did were inspired by the whole exaggerated faces thing Hannah Ireland had going on. With the feedback I got from the teacher, I made sure to keep it simple and not do too much. I took Amber’s advice and stood back for a moment to look at the paint spills and try to figure out if I could spot any detail that could form a face. I used oil pastels to follow the lines made by the paint

continuation of my idea from before. I have trouble putting my ideas to paper so I made a little mock sketch up of what I wanted the final outcome to look like. the sketch I did really helped and it’s an extra step I should take instead of jumping right into a project in the future.

the first work that I did is quite similar to my stretch but I don’t mind they both turned out good to me. the only issue was that the second work covered way too much of the acrylic spill making it no longer the main subject.

since I didn’t like how the second piece covered way too much of the paint spill I tried a different approach. instead of placing the paint in the background, I decided to place it in the foreground. the outcome was not great, didn’t like it at all.

I wanted to look into the idea that I was talking about in my last post, creating something that looks like nothing from afar but up close you start noticing stuff.

Figure-ground is a great example of that. Figure-ground is a visual relationship between foreground and background. It’s like a type of perceptual grouping which is necessary for recognizing objects through vision. I started looking at figure-ground gestalt and how I could use this in my own work since the spills that I was making kept taking the shape of a face but wonkier.

one of the spills I made looked like someone’s side profile so I wanted to highlight that. I took the oil pastel idea that I used in week two and mixed it with my paint spill idea from week one.

didn’t really like the look of it. so I moved on to another idea that is still related to faces. I went back to one of the paintings I did on week two which was the face I drew on top of another drawing I did. I thought that it was really cool covering up an old piece with a new piece of work, so that’s the idea I had in mind when making my new work on week 3.