Author: Thornton

Initially, I started this brief by driving around with my friend looking at Serra’s Verb list trying to find any places that sparked ideas. For this piece I chose the verb ‘Fold’, we got to this reserve and found these massive trees that had either been cut or fallen down overtime. It seemed like the perfect platform for someone to fold themselves over. This is what I submitted for the newspaper along with these instructions.

Fold

How to Instruct a human to hang on a branch.

First make sure that your subject is competent and coordinated enough to scale a tree (it’s okay if not I can’t either), if so direct them to a desirable spot along the branch which they can hang freely. Encourage your subject to lay down perpendicular to the tree branch. If the subject looks stiff and unnatural sing them a lullaby to relax and ease their body. When your subject is freely draped over the branch act quickly to take your desired photo as the human body isn’t as forgiving as inanimate objects your subject is going to want to wiggle around when itchy and get up when they feel like they’re going to pass out.

How to Hang freshly washed clothes on the clothesline.

Before you even touch your laundry, look outside and check the forecast to make sure it’s not going to rain. No one likes their labour being rained on. If the sun is shining, take your basket outside and prepare to hang your clothes. You want to grab the two longest sides of your garment and drape half of it over the clothesline. Next spread it along until there are no creases or folds in the garment. The last step is the secure each side of your garment to the clothesline with some plastic pegs. Now you can go inside and enjoy a cup of tea. Keep an eye out for looming clouds.

Whilst driving around we also found this little pond which instantly made us think of the verb ‘Splash’. My mate and I posted up on either side of the pond where I took photos of him aggressively throwing various items we found around the park into the water, I really like how the last photo turned out when I merged my favourite photos from this site into one image. I ended up writing an instruction list to this image as well because I got bored one night.

Splash

How to throw a stick into a body of water.

Your first task is to search far and wide for a sturdy stick worthy of a toss into some water. Once your desired stick has been found you will need to hunt down a body of water that speaks to the stick (do not half-arse this step). When the breeze is warm and the sun is shining on your back locate your desired platform to throw the stick into the water (height is subjective to how you’re feeling). When you’ve completed all the previous steps its time to let it rip, reach out to your ancestors and strike thy stick into the depths and shout into the clouds.

Throughout this brief I quickly came to realise that body and site go hand in hand like a drink and food, there is almost no purpose for a place if a body is not going to be in or interact with it. This also made me think a lot about the phrase “Wrong place wrong time” or my reinvention of it “Wrong place wrong body” as it is like we are punished for being in the wrong place, like a child in the adult section of a video store or trespassing on land that isn’t yours there’s usually always a consequence. But what feels so right about being in the wrong place like sneaking out when your meant to be in bed or sneaking into a club when you’re 16, there is always a thrill when you don’t follow the rules of your environment and make your own instead.

Cindy Sherman

I’ve always been drawn to black and white photography like a moth to light so when I saw Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills I fell in love. The feeling I get from these stills is an experience they somehow feel still and alive as well as staged and unstaged, and these were aspects I wanted to try portray in my work as well.

Rene Burri

There are quite a few similarities in Rene’s and Cindy’s work they both are able to capture that still/alive staged/unstaged feeling. Rene’s take on this is much more stylized with amazing use of colour that almost feels cinematic like a movie. Rene Burri was also a big inspiration whilst working on the ‘Just a minute’ brief.

For intervention, I had quite a bit of trouble thinking about ideas and what I could contribute to the sites around me. My friend and I were talking about the suburb we live in and how everything feels fake, no one smiles or acknowledges your existence except the lollipop man whos just happy to be alive. Even the nature seems fake its just groups of pigeons and your occasional magpie.

I initially wanted to photograph the inside of my car and create almost a little time capsule into 1990. I had a lot of trouble finding angles in my car and i ended up only liking one photo but I loved that one photo and turned it into almost a 3D image as I took the same photo twice with a little shift and got a new perspective of that car that feels cinematic.

I started making this piece to look like skin across a canvas and give it a eerie feel. I spread pva glue on my hands and arms multiple times and peeled it off until I had a collection sheds of “skin” that kept the textural surface of my actual skin, I wanted to initially lay them out on white canvas or card and have a backlight that exposes all the cracks and texture in the “skin” but everything i tried to use as a base had too much texture and the light couldn’t pick up the surface of the “skin” through it. I decided to paint a canvas and stretch this skin over it instead like a kind of leatherface/silence of the lambs esque type of surface piece. I didn’t end up finishing as I ran out of glue.

I’ve found it super entertaining exploring image transfer in this way as i’ve got a fair amount of experience in screen printing, stamp making and collage similar to this. Finding the different imagery you can transfer using this method has been really fun using my own drawings and sketches as transfers.

Jean-Michel Basquiat / SAMO©

Jean-Michel was a huge inspiration not only through this iterative work but also throughout all of my work. An iterative process that you can see throughout Basquiat’s work is in his depiction of anatomy which is greatly influenced from when he was hit by a car at the age of 7 and was gifted the book Grays anatomy by his mother while in hospital. I love the contrast between chaos and serenity in his work as they also pose as political arguments.

Another form of iteration that can be seen in Basquiat’s work is when he went under the alias SAMO with his friend Al Diaz. Their Graffiti work posed as a poetic and critical outlook on politics and consumer society as a whole.

For Holly, Teretia and I’s first collaboration piece we were still breaking the ice between us and started out simple by drawing on ms paint and then passing it on the the next person for them to draw on until it was a cohesive drawing.

For our second collaboration piece we thought it would be a cool idea to collect pictures of flowers from around where we live and collage them together with holly’s awesome photoshop skills. This idea was pretty cool for us as we each live on different sides of auckland so we would all have different flowers.

Our last collaboration piece was definitely my favourite, we each sourced a baby photo of ourselves and decided to draw on them with our different artistic touches and then collage them in to be a very weird but wholesome family photo.

My third iteration piece is this set of 6 lighters which I covered in a white acrylic paint and drew over in sharpie. The imagery on these lighters represents the pros and cons to smoking cannabis, on the left side are the pros and on the right are the cons.

For the pros I drew a skeleton with the iconic red and orange glow you see on the nurofen ads to represent how cannabis is a natural alternative to addictive painkillers. The next lighter has a man to represent anxiety and how cannabis can be incredible at curing anxiety. The last lighter on left side is a stomach to represent cannabis’ ability to treat appitite loss linked with conditions like HIV/AIDS.

For the first lighter of the cons I drew lungs to represent lung damage from any smoking/vaping. On the next lighter I drew a gavel and scales for the fact that cannabis is still illegal in most countries although the NZ justice system is pretty flexible with possession there are still countless people around the world doing time for selling a pretty harmless plant. The last lighter on the right side is a brain and nerves to represent memory loss and the damage cannabis can have on cognitive functions.

My second attempt at iteration was through graffiti. I made 10 iterations of my tag ‘Hooz’ and wanted to create a contrast between artistic language. Instead of doing these tags on a sketchpad, stickers, or on the street I used a copy of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ by Shakespeare.