scanned images and text

In a continuation of what I wrote about here I’ve been scanning the paper that I’ve added images and text to. I’m going to add more layers of text and image to these pages then scan and print them again. Below are some of the scans. I like the way they look, I like the layers, I like the grid paper and the textures that are captured.

I’m moving to London

I’m going to live in London for a while. I spontaneously applied for a two year UK visa and it was approved surprisingly quickly and I booked a flight to London for July and then I resigned from my job. I’ve been in a daze for weeks, too tired to function. Thinking about acceptance, selfishness, sacrifice, serendipity, foolishness, fate, ambition, self-awareness. Feel like walls are closing in on me but also collapsing at the same time. Whatever happens was always inevitable. I’ve never had access to a lot of physical space to make and store work and now that I’m only able to take a small amount of things with me to London I have had to adjust things even further until I leave. I’ve been making art works with small pieces of paper and in my imagination. I’m writing a lot, typing and writing words on paper. I want to write on huge pieces of paper but I’m keeping them small for now. Years ago when something very bad happened to me, I soothed myself with the mantra: “if very bad things can happen to me unexpectedly, then very good things can happen to me unexpectedly too.” Things are always moving around, changing, I barely recognise myself but there is also no other way that things could have been.

progress

I’m thinking about my study statement and objectives for my project, what have I done and not done, where am I. I seem to be doing what I planned to do. I’m still committed to creating self-portraits for the duration of the course and have been doing this consistently and am finding it meaningful. I’m still using Instagram to build a world and perform this world. I’m still reading as much as I can. I’m making a physical book. I had planned to present some kind of very small scale installation by the end of this year. I still want to do this but I’ve had to put it on hold for a little while and change my thinking about the logistics of it for reasons I won’t go into just yet. The reasons are not bad, there are just things to wait for and figure out.

I now also have plans to make two more books. One will include a selection of the printed self-portraits and their captions. The other will include images made from text (building on this kind of thing that I experimented with in the interim show). The text will also come from the image captions but will be edited and abstracted, not written in their original form

There was mention in my Unit One feedback about whether I could make some kind of short film within this project. I don’t want to do this in any kind of conventional way but I have been enjoying experimenting with the editing of some recent videos on OnlyFans and I do think about how it would feel to compile them all together into one “film”. I also had an idea about creating an experimental video that would play with the format of an “instructional” video, using poetic narration.

class 16/5/24, experimenting with text and printing images

In class we talked about strategies for research. We did a writing exercise and had to write down words associated with our area of research/interest and the exercise unexpectedly ended up unlocking something for me about my art. I’ve been experimenting with making images made of text and have been trying to figure out exactly how I want to do this, trying different things. I want to work with the text from my OnlyFans image captions and have recently started printing some photos and writing the caption by hand below onto the paper, just to see how it feels, after discussing printing the photos during my last tutorial with Jonathan. For example:

The writing exercise we did in class was really appealing to me aesthetically because we were asked to write in a particular clock-inspired formation. This created an interesting image made of words that I really liked and I also liked the stream of consciousness word association and the unexpected words that were generated from this.

I’ve been wanting to write or paint or somehow put words onto paper (or onto something) but I think I’ve unconsciously been worried about the minimal aesthetic of this and that it’s “not interesting” but after seeing the words I wrote in my notebook during class and how they looked on the page, and also after experimenting with handwritten captions like in the photo above, I feel more motivated to follow my interest/intuition. Another thing I’ve been kind of worried about is handwritten text versus typed. I think I’ve been limiting myself to thinking that if I make images using text that it has to be typed, because this is more in line in an obvious way with the rest of my project’s aesthetic/concept. But really, that is just a random limitation I’m putting onto myself for no real reason.

The other day an image came into my mind of a white desk covered in my hand writing in black permanent marker. So this is an object/sculpture I’m now planning to make at some point. The exercise in class made me think further about the aesthetic/affect that handwriting can produce.

new self-portraits

I made some new self-portraits last night and this morning, experimenting with the bridal/wedding aesthetic. Here are some examples:

Things that worked well:

• I finally bought a handheld bluetooth remote thing to use with my phone to take photos, I don’t know why I put this off for so long. I think because I like to use the bare minimum when it comes to equipment/tech so I was just being stubborn about it, idk. But using this made things a lot easier and quicker.
• Using a wedding veil as a prop gave good results aesthetically.
• It was refreshing doing something different to usual, new theme, new clothes, new props.
• Usually I listen to music when I’m taking photos. This time I didn’t and I preferred it. I think I was able to focus more and things seemed to flow better and it felt more productive.

Challenges:

• The wedding veil was hard to work with, though I like the way it looks. It’s long, it kept sliding around and I was often half tripping over it. Also being covered in it made me hot really quickly from the synthetic which I didn’t expect because it’s so light but it felt very bad on my skin.
• Realised a simple thing which is that I need to make sure I drink more water while I’m working, the tiring-ness of making photos/videos tends to kind of creep up on me and then I’ll suddenly feel faint and dehydrated.
• Making self-portraits is a lot harder when I have my period, there’s just more to think about, plus the intense pain and fatigue and increased anxiety. I don’t feel as much like moving my body around and doing things that rely on physical action, so I usually try to plan my longer shoots around this. I wasn’t able to do that on this occasion and it felt particularly precarious doing a shoot that involved all white clothes and underwear. Really need to try and avoid this next time. It’s frustrating to have to think about this.

class 2/5/24, group critique

In class we had a group critique. I showed these self-portraits (one is a screenshot of a video posted on OnlyFans):

The conversation was supportive and valuable. I feel reassured that the work is doing something towards what I’m wanting it to do – elicit questions about commodifying the self, commodifying art, different “gazes”, what constitutes work, the problems of work, the blurred lines between performance/reality, selling art and selling the body/self/sex/sexuality.

I talked about the three thematic/conceptual/aesthetic phases that my self-portraits will have throughout my project. The first phase which is pretty much at an end is the corporate/office aesthetic and kind of sexy secretary/office siren persona. The second phase is a wedding/bridal inspired aesthetic using a bride persona. I have just started taking images for this phase, there are a couple of examples above of photos that incorporate the bridal veil. The third phase is the persona of the maid/cleaner/housewife. Certain visual elements will run throughout the whole project for example, the setting of a hotel can easily be applied to each phase, so there will be a bit of overlap, but overall each phase will be visually distinct. It was useful to articulate these ideas to the group and to identify their significance. I have a personal connection to/interest in all three personas/aesthetics. They each represent or allow an opportunity to explore different ideas of work/performance. They each also represent three commonly fetishised images/ideas/”categories” of women.

We discussed the interactions I have with people (men) online on Instagram and OF and how sometimes reactions to the content can be unexpected. Something that has come up for me quite recently, which I talked a little bit about with Dee after the class had ended, is an increasing awareness of the potential for parasocial or semi-parasocial relationships forming through this work and the problems that can come with this. I think I’ll try to write about that in a separate post as I don’t have the energy for it right now and it’s a big tangent.

I think it was Dee who asked whether I plan to use the comments and messages I get on Instagram/OF to make some kind of art work. This is something I’ve thought about, because there are some quite compelling messages, questions etc. that I receive. For example, I shared the following message with the group. I posted the below self-portrait to my Instagram story and someone responded: “Very interesting photo, I understand that it’s you, I understand that it’s something very beautiful, but I can’t understand what exactly”.

I thought this message was really poignant and insightful. Of course, there are sometimes responses that are more sexualised and vulgar and more in line with what you might expect. Another recent message I received said, “Your profile just made me c*m so much”. They seem like quite different reactions but they are both quite intense.

I feel okay about occasionally sharing messages like this on the blog because while this is technically public I don’t share or promote this blog anywhere and the purpose of it is to learn and reflect on learning. However, using other people’s words to make an art work that I call my own, especially words from private messages, isn’t something I feel completely okay with. I think I would feel guilty about this. I also want my work (at least for this project) to be very much my own voice and representative of my experiences and actions and my subjective point of view. Something I’ve considered is keeping a document where I copy text from messages I receive and then edit, cut, rearrange them into a poetic text similar to my own style of writing, so that they are transformed into something that ends up being quite removed from the sharing of an exact copy of other people’s words. Given that I am already making text based images using my OF captions in this style, it might be interesting to also make versions of these images using the message text, so this is something I will think about more. It’s probably worth experimenting with, even if I don’t end up showing it anywhere publicly.

trying to reflect on my self-portraits

I’ve been trying to think with more depth or precision about what I like and don’t like about my photos, what makes them work or not work. But I get kind of annoyed and frustrated when I feel pressured to do this. The pressure is from myself but also in the context of the course because it’s important to reflect on our work. I’m not frustrated by being encouraged to reflect, I’m frustrated because I feel like I can’t articulate clearly enough why I think certain photos work and others don’t. Maybe I should try to write about them more frequently.

This one works:

Why does it work? It just feels right to me. Why? Things feel like they’re in the right place. The long exposure effect has placed a ghostly image of the phone receiver over my body in a way that looks right. The lamp in the background works and makes the photo better than if it wasn’t there, I think.

This one works to me because of the way my body is angled. It creates a small but, to me, significant tension. And I like the laptop being there, the image would be less interesting to me without it. I think the laptop kind of “ruins” the image which I like. Because the body element of the photo has a sensual quality and then there’s this blunt, inanimate, technological object next to the live body. I guess that’s been something I’ve been working with the whole time, the intersection of the live/sensual/sexual/corporeal/moveable with the inanimate – laptops, phones, hard surfaces.

OnlyFans updates, reflections, Holly Elizaveta

Something I don’t think I’ve written about yet in the blog is that on OnlyFans my name is Holly Elizaveta. My real given names are Holly Elizabeth. Using this slightly different name is something I did to kind of enhance a feeling of adopting a persona within this facet of my work without trying to be a totally different person. I like that it’s subtle. And I like how it points to the thin line between authenticity and facade. I advertise my OF through my Instagram, which has my full name. I’m therefore not trying to use OF anonymously or hide it from people. Yet the name I use on OF is slightly different to my real name, which would imply a desire to obscure my identity. I like the confusion of this, the blurring of who I am and what I’m doing and why.

An OF subscriber recently requested a video of me in the shower. At first I was going to decline as I didn’t know if I would be able to make something like that within the bounds of my project’s conceptual and aesthetic framework. However I thought about it some more and had some ideas that I felt might work so I decided to do it. I ended up quite enjoying the challenge of making this video and I particularly enjoyed editing it, the filming itself was kind of tiring and tedious but fortunately didn’t take very long.

I film and edit all of my videos on my MacBook. I used random things from the apartment I’m staying in to position and prop up my MacBook in various positions in the bathroom so I could film – cushions, towels, books, etc. I covered the keyboard with a towel after pressing record each time to try and protect it from water. I went into the shoot with a basic idea of what I wanted to capture and some other ideas also came up while I was filming.

I can’t post the video here because I don’t like to re-share anything custom that someone has paid for but here are some screenshots to give a sense of the aesthetic:

I liked experimenting with aesthetics of dreaminess, fantasy and performance. The shower/bathroom actually has a lot of the things I like – shiny surfaces, mirrors, opportunities for glowy-ness and blurriness (via steam). I like making use of mirrors. They illuminate questions about performance, reflection, watching the self, being watched, doubling the self.

I was aware of constructing shots and angles that would cater to the so called male gaze or fit into a kind of conventional category of heteronormative visual erotic-ness. But I also felt able to include stylistic choices that subtly undermined this, via a kind of pointing to it. For example, in one shot I am sitting on the floor of the shower while water pours down. The shot cuts out my face so only my body is visible. I am almost directly facing the camera. I sit there for quite a long time holding a pose completely still amidst the water and the white noise the water creates.

To me there is a kind of overt objectifying of the body that occurs in this shot, a more obvious objectification than in the shots that are very quick or in which my body is in some kind of motion. Through the sitting still, for a length of time that is quite long for a video like this, with a shot just of my body, no face to remind the viewer of individuality or personality – I offer my body as a static object for the viewer. A little clue to indicate my consciousness and control (or an attempt at some kind of relative control?) over what I’m doing and how I’m presenting myself. My objectification is not an accident and hasn’t been imposed upon me. Or rather, it has been imposed upon me in a broader sense, because I am a woman alive in a world in which women are routinely, almost automatically objectified in various ways. But in this moment, I am using, or trying to use, a particular version or instance of objectification to my advantage.

This choice is quite subtle and might not be picked up on by anyone but me. But I like including these kinds of things. It’s sort of amusing to me. And I wonder about all the videos I’ve made and will make, if they were put together into a compilation at the end of the project, if these clues would become more apparent when viewed consecutively.

Something that has also occurred in my self-portraits, both still and video, is that I don’t really smile or appear to be having a good time. Most of my portraits don’t include my face, but some do, and in those my expression is always neutral, maybe even bored or annoyed. This happened kind of intuitively at first and now it’s something I’m interested in exploring further as a deliberate choice.

interim show reflections

Some notes and thoughts:

• The act of making the effort to print my photos onto canvases, packing them into my suitcase, praying they wouldn’t be damaged in transit, getting to London, finding a shop in London that sold whiteboards and magnets, rearranging my text on paper over and over on the whiteboards, putting the canvases together and hanging the whiteboards and canvases on the wall (with assistance from the technicians who were so kind and patient and offered their opinions in a helpful way), taking the packaging back to my apartment, then bringing it back to CSM, taking the work down, taking the canvases apart with help from Jonathan showing me how to use a drill, repacking everything, taking it all back to my apartment, then arranging to post some of it home so I don’t have to repack it all back into my suitcase, was all worthwhile.

• It was worthwhile because while it can be a logistical and mental nightmare to present even a small work, I learned a lot doing it. It was useful to see my photos in a physical form, hanging on a wall. While I only showed nine images, it still gave me a sense of the mass/saturation idea that I’m thinking about – the idea of presenting the images as a mass, as a way to perhaps illuminate questions around work, labour, productivity, creating products, commodities, online content creation, etc. I liked how the photos looked on canvas and I liked the way I presented them close to each other and the way this allowed them to sort of bleed together, especially as they all use a similar colour palette. I presented them in a grid of three squares by three to create a big square, inspired by the format of an instagram grid.

• I would like to be able to experiment with printing huge versions of the images, but this would be really expensive so I’m not sure how feasible it is.

• I enjoyed experimenting with presenting some of my images made of text. I really wasn’t sure how it would look/feel, if I would like it or not. But I felt that this was a good opportunity to just try something. I liked playing around with the paper that I printed the text onto, it was just regular printer paper and I allowed it to become creased, bent, folded etc. I think this aesthetic worked fine in the context of this show. But I think in future I would like to keep the images more pristine and present them in a different way. I’m not sure yet what the most effective way to show them is, it’s something to keep thinking about. I went to the Tate Modern yesterday and there was a section of text based art which gave me some things to consider, I will write a separate post about this.

• Part of the reason I wanted to try presenting the text images is because I’m trying to figure out how to present the self-portraits in a physical/gallery setting while including some of the context regarding their original presentation setting of OnlyFans. All of the text presented in the interim show was from the captions on my OF photos, as well as text presented directly from my OF profile. This is something that I need to keep considering. Do the images need this context and explanation and if so, what is the best way to provide it? I’m really not sure yet.

• I felt confident about my work in the sense that I feel secure about who I am as an artist and what I’m doing. I’m experimenting and figuring things out of course and I can always improve but I didn’t feel concerned about what other people were doing, didn’t feel the need to compare. I haven’t always felt like this, so it’s a relief to be in this place now. I still want to keep learning and finding inspiration from other artists, and I very much do. But I don’t worry much anymore about whether my work is more or less good/interesting than other people’s. My work is my work and I only need to really compare it to versions of itself.

her skin has a natural glow

In the last tutorial with Jonathan we were talking a little about whether/how I edit my photos and he mentioned the glowy look they have. I think he asked how deliberate this was and I said something about my choice to make them that way being mostly “intuitive”. Then a few days later I realised that my poem that inspired the self-portrait aspect of this project reads:

I think she is around the same age as me
But she is far more accomplished
Her skin has a natural glow
She has a body of work

When I was writing these lines I was describing a kind of fantasy woman in my mind who I think was a kind of amalgamation of women/artists I admired at the time and I guess felt somewhat inferior to. Anyway it’s interesting that I haven’t been consciously creating that glowy effect as a response to that line but now the aesthetic makes sense. The me/”self” in my self-portraits is maybe partially the version of me that is like the fantasy woman I’m describing in these lines.