Sophie b first draft

Text on Method:

This is a statement explaining where my ideas and research come into being artworks. I want the reader to understand how and why I work through my ideas. By writing this text and comparing old works to new works, I hope to come to an understanding of where I am currently with my practice.

I will begin by describing the latest performance I made for my second group critique of the year, and how this work might develop into further strands of work. I believe my works to mostly come from the same pool of ideas. Therefore, I don’t work on a project or single work at a time, each work leads to the next and material spreads across multiple works. I will reflect on the last few works I’ve made since being at the PZI, as well as relating them to my previous work.

“Shy Girls” is a performance work with the intention of using the video documentation as material for future works. A female perfomer is kneeling in the centre of the space. There are chairs surrounding the performer facing different directions and not necessarily towards the performer. This is deliberate in order to arrange the audience’s gaze. The composition allows the performance to be watched from many angles, to create multiple viewing experiences. The performer is naked and around her are four bowls filled with cheap melted ice cream (strawberry, vanilla and chocolate) into a fleshy/beige/skin colour. The performer begins putting the ambiguous substance on her feet and working gradually up to her face. While she is doing this, she speaks two words, “Special” and “Smothered”. The voice begins in a whisper and gradually develops into loud shout or scream. Once the body is covered she pauses and breathes heavily. Her legs are trembling throughout.

The performance was an experiment/test to see what where the work can lead. I wanted to make it since the end of last year where I decided these two words had become important to me. I wanted to talk about the many meanings that these words associated with. I wanted to raise urgency by the performance specific medium about issues affect women today, relating to food, consumption, body-image, control, and social pressures.

I want it to relate to identity or stereotypes as well as consumption through a feminist perspective. My practice involves research into the gendered emotions of doubt, self-conscious and anxieties when exposed to societal pressures and constructs of contemporary life. The performance will last for about 10 minutes and by the end of the performance the performers skin will be covered or smothered in the physical ice cream, a thin layer coating the skin to conceal or protect.

Using the naked body can have a lot of connotations and I am afraid but aware of objectification and sexualising the form through the viewer’s gaze, but I am keen to see how I can redirect these common associations and to try and think of the flesh as a material linked to identity but not necessarily body. How a naked body can be used today in contemporary art and how to avoid confusion of 70’s body art and body painting or a cliché representation of feminist performance art as a lazy reading of the work is something that interests me. I want to take the work into a video piece, highlighting different parts of the body and using voice to contradict meaning. This is a method I have used before when I did a haircutting performance, which I then edited into a video with layers of voice and subtitles to expose an inner contradictory voice to the one which appears in the actual performance.

I am interested in the gaze and interaction between audience and viewer, and by thinking about the positioning of the audience, how can I create a non-confrontation, non-spectacle approach to this performance. The gaze of the performers will be the engagement with the material and their own flesh. The performers will take on a role as a sort of non-body, a non-individual, rather acting as one entire body or mass in relation to identity or stereotype.

The previous work I made was ‘Strawberry’, a two-minute video work with three shots. It begins in a kitchen at the window with the camera facing out toward the light (it’s a bright sunny day). Held up by the hand of the protagonist is the silhouette of a disfigured strawberry. The protagonist plays with the strawberry in her hand, twisting it around to reveal its form. The ‘Strawberry’ is dropped and with an exaggerated sound effect you hear it hit the windowsill. The camera begins zooming in and out of the strawberry and a voice over starts to say, “You are not perfect” over and over again in different edited voices. Then you see the protagonist eat the strawberry with a close up shot of the mouth and there is laughing from an external source.

‘Strawberry’ was filmed using hand held mobile camera as in my previous works. The use of the artist’s own voice, an attention to hands and body parts as well as the format of a video made this work relate to previous works. The internal domestic setting of ‘Strawberry’ creates an intimate environment conducive to feelings of anxieties and self-consciousness prevalent in previous works.

The work was made whilst beginning my studies at the Piet Zwart Institute in October 2016. The fruit used was bought at one of the Rotterdam markets whilst living in a new city. It was filmed in Dutch kitchen that creates a different aesthetic from previous locations where I have filmed. For me it was still very much associated with my previous work in content but now embedded in the new style of where I live. Some people have said it has a youtube/DIY quality and therefore fits into an amateur art making aesthetic possibly thinking about a de-skilling or anti-art. Such as in ‘Strawberry’ where the light in is purposely at an undesirably position to see the strawberry.

The video produced discussion around the terms imperfection/perfection and how it is portrayed by the media and in advertising. The ironic tone created a critic of contemporary advertising and was aiming to raise issues about shame, embarrassment and self-image or perception.

The work was similar to past work in content. It produced discussion about consumption, advertising, social constructs and a gendered vulnerability. My work uses the artist’s body and voice. My choice of the words such as “special” and “perfect”, which I think are memorable but also talk to the language of advertising. People have certain connotations about these words and by repetition I am trying to add irony. There was also the strawberry flavour in ice cream and actual strawberry in the video. I think many of my works are intimate.

The differences between the past work and current work was the form, one being a video and one being a performance. The performance was a more planned and prepared work whereas the video was much more spontaneous and made very quickly. The performance was something I was thinking about for a few months and it developed, changed and adapted as I worked through the ideas and planning. ‘Strawberry’ was an idea that pretty much grew out of encountering the strawberry and filming it one morning. The initial idea was the how the work took form. The performance had a more serious and vulnerable tone whereas ‘Strawberry’ was more playful and ironic.

Frequently, my work is triggered by an everyday or ordinary encounter with an object, word or sentence or phrase, idea or experience. Hence these ideas are based in reality and aim to engage with an audience where they can associate or empathise with. In the work, I draw upon the sentiments of irony or hyperbole to develop from my initial idea. This is something I’ve realised since reflecting upon my works in the methods class. I find there is an oscillating boundary between things being ironic or sentimental and I find this an intriguing confine to work around. I see connections throughout my work which link to things I’ve been reading or things I encounter in my life. My work doesn’t relate directly to research as I digest information over time and tend to feel intuitive about idea but after reflecting I realise many strands of research come through my ideas in months to come.

I make quite a lot of video which are mostly are under 10 minutes. I definitely think of my works as separate pieces once they are done. I am interested detecting links between them and presenting work alongside one another to build a picture for the viewer.

In a broader context the work could be on an online forum or website that deals with female insecurities and younger girls or teens worrying about body imperfections. It could be used as artwork in a doctors or sexual health clinic. It could be used a sort of mockery of advertisement to remind people about being saturated by the media by perfect bodies and brain washed into thinking about products we need to buy to enhance ourselves.

I have been reading Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight. I think many of the ideas and themes in the book are visible in my recent work. I am interested in unpacking emotional baggage, which can be seen as destructive or inhibiting. As I work from a personal gendered outlook, I often find myself looking toward feminist discourse about anxieties and insecurities about one’s own body and mind. I use an inner voice to express a neuroticism or angst in relation to guilt versus pleasure in a conflicting dialogue. This text interests me as it gives lots of examples, from feminist perspectives, as well as advertising and in the media. I am able to visualise some of it into imagery or spoken word through my own art making. I am using transcripts from male and female perspectives to look at patterns in speech and also writing my texts from a personal or inner voice. I feel influenced by the writing of Helene Cixous and Lispector (Jan’s Seminar). I often record spoken word and then transcribe it into text, so often it’s spoken before it’s written.

The another work I made at PZI a video called “Activities for Couples”. It takes generic stock photography of leisure activities or ideas for couples into a slide show presentation with a voice over addressing each activity. I would say it’s a comment on leisure activities or non-places through the banality of modernity or heteronormativity. I feel this work was inspired by watching a lot of dating shows, stumbling on blogs related to love advice and beginning to read Why Love Hurts by Eva Illouz.

I use texts a lot, often a mixture of found texts from articles and books, generic sentences or clichés and use them without attribution. I make notes on my mobile; often internal thoughts, private notes, reflections n your own actions; small anecdotes about particular objects; slogans from advertising; material people text me, from Instagram; then I put them in a word document and make it into a script, consider the length of each sentence, interweaving the sentences, reading them out loud as I work; I revisit the text intermittently. It provides the framework for a video piece (one of a few works in progress).  Once I am happy with the order I record it. I use my own voice because I can direct myself more easily. 

‘Now’s a good time to get up in the times zone you’re in’ was the last work I made before coming to the PZI and I feel it’s my most accomplished. It contains a variety of short clips ranging from one to ten seconds. The shots vary from close-ups of a body to wider, more staged shots of interiors and exteriors as well as the body, products and food. There is a female voiceover that speaks in a low unembellished tone at a constant speed which creates a rhythm. The voice talks in the first and third person, alluding to different perspectives from an individual. The work arose from a text that was made by weaving many narratives together from my own writing as well as using found text from self-help advertising for anxieties on social media. It aims to create a relentless, self-exhausting but hopefully trancelike experience for the viewer.

My future work will stem from a diary voice note that I recorded at the end of last year. The work will most likely be a video but possibility of a performance. If it’s a video, I will use the text as a voice over and record it myself. I want to make the footage based around some of the images and visuals spoken about in the audio. I want it to have a similar hand-held camera filming style or possibly I should try out something else as I realise as I am writing this I’m quite stuck in my routine and I should probably try and screw things up a little. Maybe I will shot some really neat clean shots that would contrast the tone of the text. I think I need to create some kind of juxtaposition or tension between language and visuals, which has been lacking in previous works. I will go back to the text and think about different ways to read it or perform it. And then maybe the tension can come from that rather than changing the way I film.

I feel this work is the next instinctual stage in my making process. It has been in the back of my mind for a number of months and I keep thinking about shots I can use. I think it’s necessary for me to not think too hard about why I am making it and hopefully through the making process links and connections to previous works will reveal themselves. As this normally happens to me. I think it’s good for me to make this work without having a presentation moment in mind and to see my natural working mood without having the stress of a group crit (as I have done both the crits for year 1). I am excited to do some new shooting as I feel like I haven’t done any for a while. I want to have fun with this work. It feels a bit like visual poetry, which is exciting as I’ve not made any work quite like this before or maybe I have but not for a while.