Tag: self-portrait

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.

research paper progress, tutorial with Maiko

  • I’ve been using Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) as a lens through which to look at Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits.

  • My initial ideas for the research paper all had something to do with presentation of self and authenticity and multiplicity and contradiction. My starting point was a subversion of a statement from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967). He wrote that “In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false”. I was interested in subverting this and considering when/how the inverse might also be illuminated, that the false might be a moment of the true. Because this is how I feel when I look at Woodman’s photographs. In her work I see the images she created that speak to illusion, fantasy, movement, transience, contradiction, myth, magic, shadows, and I think that what she offers is quite a stark “truth” rather than a falseness, despite the theatrical and dreamlike qualities of her images. And I think it’s her offer of illusion itself that that creates the authenticity present in her work, i.e. the falseness is the truth.

  • The Ethics of Ambiguity offers a more specific framework to hold Woodman’s work up against. I’m currently working through the key ideas that de Beauvoir posits in her writing about ambiguity and exploring to what extent Woodmans’ self-portraits embody the principles. In the book de Beauvoir argues that, “As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it. They have striven to reduce mind to matter, or to reabsorb matter into mind, or to merge them within a single substance.” and that, “To attain his truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it. He rejoins himself only to the extent that he agrees to remain at a distance from himself.”

  • I’m interested in why ambiguity is important now in particular. To me, embracing ambiguity (and paying attention to art that does this) is a potential antidote to some of the contemporary problems around presentation/performance of the self (which also relates to much of what was described and anticipated by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle). The problem, in my opinion, is that the presentation of self has moved away from an exploratory gesture often present within art, into the everyday and has become so commonplace and heavily commodified that people seem reluctant to embrace the multifaceted-ness of self in favour of a flattening of self, a creation of a niche personality, a defined set of attributes that are presented to their audience, so that they (their “self”, their “image”) can be neatly categorised and monetised. There appears to be little room to present oneself as a contradictory being because this is too complex, too nerve-wracking, too confusing for an audience with a diminishing attention span, and too difficult for sponsors and advertisers to work with.

  • I mentioned to Maiko in my tutorial that I don’t want to come across as though I’m condemning the presentation of self online or condemning social media etc. She said that it’s okay to highlight something that I am wanting to be resolved and to focus on what I am advocating for rather than condemning something.

  • We also talked briefly about how in the case of Francesca Woodman, she is an artist who frequently has a mythical “self” projected onto her from other people. Her life was so short and so there is a not a huge amount of material that gives us insight into her thinking about her work. There are some letters and bits of journals and some back and forth correspondence with an interviewer but a lot of what we know (“know”) about her and how she worked and viewed art comes from the observations and opinions of her family and friends. And because she died by suicide, the circumstances of her death are often projected onto her work. Assumptions are made about her mental and emotional state and her images are often read through that lens. So there is a whole other layer around “self” in relation to her work, beyond just the fact that she made self-portraits. There is the “self” of her that is located outside of her that has been constructed by other people in her absence.

  • All of this feels like a lot to consider when writing a relatively short paper. But it still feels too early to be too contained. My focus for now is to write about Woodman’s work in relation to ambiguity and The Ethics of Ambiguity and keep going from there.

experimenting with images and text, book making, layers of meaning

I’m continuing to experiment with putting/printing my photos onto paper and adding handwritten text. I’m going to scan the pages, print them, add more layers of images and text, scan them again, print them again, see what that does. I’m going to try printing directly onto grid or lined paper from from notebooks like the one below, instead of just onto regular white copy paper. I want to create a book to present images of most of the self-portraits from this project, along with the text taken from the OnlyFans captions.

I like taking the captions and writing them by hand, breaking them up and singling out certain words or building upon them with new words. I’ve also been physically cutting up some of the paper that I’ve written text on to, which distorts things a little and offers additional layers of meaning. I like the physical element of this way of making. As in, I could create layers of text/images digitally but I like doing it by hand, the writing and cutting up and scanning and printing.

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.

tutorial with Jonathan 8/5/24

What was discussed:

  • Briefly, my anxiety re the research paper.
  • New self-portraits with the bridal/wedding theme and how this theme connects to broader ideas around “work”.
  • Jonathan asked me how I work practically with the different themes. I specified that I am working on one at a time, i.e. I haven’t been creating work around all three themes simultaneously and then presenting it one by one. I prefer to immerse myself in one at a time and then present the work while I’m making it.
  • I mentioned that earlier in the project I was focused a lot on the idea of creating a “saturation” of images and that this was just as or more important than the images themselves, presenting a mass of images. This is still important but the individual images have become more important to me. I want each image to be interesting on its own, not just interesting in the context of presenting them all together.
  • We talked about different ways of presenting the images physically not just online. Jonathan mentioned that I create a lot of rules around my art and I thought it was really interesting that he said this because it’s true and I have been thinking about it a lot lately. I always want to my work to be conceptually rigorous and to have reasons behind the choices I make. But I may need to allow myself to experiment more freely in the early stages and remember that just because I try something it doesn’t mean I have to use it or show it publicly if I don’t like it. I said that when I think about the different ways that I could present the images physically I get a bit frozen because I worry that there is a right and wrong way to do it and I don’t know what the right way is. But of course there is no way that is technically right or wrong I just need to try things and find what makes sense for me.
  • I mentioned that I would love to make an installation in a real office space, like on a big floor of a big building with lots of office cubicles and how I get sort of stuck when I think about ideas that don’t feel possible for me at the moment logistically. We talked about finding ways to realise simpler versions of ideas on a smaller scale (Jonathan mentioned the maquette, a small version of a sculpture before the real thing is made). Like maybe I can’t access an entire office right now but I could do something with one desk or access one desk in an office. We also talked about the option of using an existing space to create a moment or installation (e.g. putting my photos in a real office space) versus the option of putting work into a dislocated setting (e.g. putting objects from an office into the street). Neither is better, just different ways of considering presentation.
  • We talked about the Sermon on the Body book. Jonathan observed my choices – using the 12 point Times New Roman font, the most basic/simple font option, very minimal. The rudimentary decorative style – creating rough holes in the paper with scissors, the size of the tape that is used to stick down the ribbons, the ribbons being visible on the back of the page as well if they are tied through/around the paper, the use of plastic and a binder.

Next steps:

  • I’m going to print some photos onto paper and just see how they look and how it feels and play with them in some way and not worry about the outcome being right or wrong.
  • I’m going to go back to my study statement and reflect on where I’m up to, if I’m doing what I thought I’d be doing at this point or am I not, what have I discovered.
  • I’m going to keep making self-portraits and pushing myself in terms of the composition of each image.
  • I’m going to keep making pages for Sermon on the Body and allow myself to enjoy this process.
  • I’m going to keep reading about things that I’m interested in and trust that I will be able to come up with a topic for the research paper as a result of doing that.

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.