Creative Practice @creative-enquirymartharitchie - Tumblr Blog

Degree show mock up, balloons likely to be green and yellow in keeping with anxiety attack brand colours.

Tv showcasing anxiety attack advert placed alongside the products

anxiety attack design

Playing about with some signage for the Anxiety Attack display.. thinking i like the top image best as it includes the anxiety attack logo and allows for other bits of branding to be added.

QR codes generated that link to https://anxietyattack.bigcartel.com/ to allow for the audience to the degree show to check out the website and maybe buy?

Not sure whether to go green and white in line with branding or just classic black and white

pens

thinking of having these out for the viewer to take from the promotional presentation of anxiety attack. Promotional pens are quintessential marketing tool, they are a feature of any display stand

Maybe made out of fimo/air dry clay and painted? Again in keeping with the handmade pastiche aesthetic, a replica of a promotional pen

Promotional product ideas

Promotional product research - I think it would add to the satirical over the top product promotional display to have ‘Anxiety attack promotional products

- stress balls would be ideal as a promotion product for an anxiety cleaning product!

- balloons filling the space would give that over the top look.. hand painted anxiety attack branding? Balloons would need to be foil as latex isnt allowed in college

- handmade anxiety attack pens to give out to the audience?

proandproductionmartharitchie

This is "Anxiety Attack Advert Final Cut" by Martha Ritchie on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

Final outcome for the “Anxiety Attack Advert”, I got my friend to record one of the scripts I wrote and overdubbed it over an old flash advert.The voice sync up is not perfect but I think it gives a good enough jist of what the idea I want to put across. Going to make this advert properly when we can start working with people again.

Ideally I would have liked to have produced the advert from scratch using an actor, but due to lockdown restrictions I was only able to mock up the vibe of the advert.

The piece is a development of this idea of anxiety growing like mould within the home, in a world like that there would be cleaning products to help eradicate this anxiety when it cropped up. Advertising in todays society is filled with discourse on feminism and gender politics, especially cleaning products.

It is said that cleaning in the house is still predominantly completed by the woman, one of the last unequal frontiers in todays society. In my alternative reality would this still be true? Would the women be responsible for cleaning the anxiety for all the family? How would one differentiate each persons anxiety? Would it be a different colour/shape? Or would all anxiety just be the same?

Would be interesting to play about with different voices.. ive found that most cleaning adverts are narrated English men, even though they are geared towards women.. what does this say about gender within advertising? Men in positions of power providing women the tools to upkeep the house.

creative-enquirymartharitchie

Inspired by these over the top JML product displays, think this is the type of thing id like to recreate.

I love JML products because they seem always entirely unnecessary, things to make your life a bit easier, but they dont really, like these shower feet things, when you could just wash your feet?

I think JML is the embodiment of hyper consumerism, consumerism gone nuts. It makes us thinks we need these unnecessary products, selling us a lifestyle, telling us this will make our lives even easier!

I created a spoof online shop where all of the ‘Anxiety Attack’ product range can be viewed and bought in one place. I took inspiration from the cheesy JML website and also the National Felt Service website created by Lucy Sparrow for her felted chemist shop.

I really liked how NFS was based directly off the boots website because using it feels VERY familiar but initially its hard to pinpoint why. Like you’ve seen it before but you cant remember where.

I wasnt able to create a very complex website as it became quite costly and also i didnt have enough time to dedicate to the web design, i do think its worked well though.

Its gaudy and garish but it has everything you would expect in an online shop. It makes you question, is this real? What am i actually buying?

Ive set the shop up so that people can actually buy the products, thinking of having a QR code linking to the shop in the degree show?

Why is a group of contemporary artists still creating falsely naive, child-like artworks? Read about the curious faux naif art and those creating it today.

Faux Naif : False Naive Art which attempts to imitate the qualities of childlike art and outsider art.

These artists wanted to escape the insincere sophistication created within the traditional system of the arts and imitate the unaffected, authentic experience of our world.

Authenticity - not being consumed with creating ‘good’ art as defined by the art world, but instead embracing your own individual style.

I have really struggled with having faith in my childlike drawing skills this semester. Ive bounced between creating pastiche pieces and making objects as life like as possible as to invoke the uncanny.

Through exploration of other ‘naive’ artists and self reflection ive come to re-evaluate my own interpretation of what good art is. The naive quality of my drawings serve a purpose, they enhance the concept. Their silly nature is supposed to make people laugh, and open up the floor for a discussion around mental health in a non threatening way.

The drawings have meaning and power because of their childlike quality, not despite it. They are authentic which is something I have come to revere in my making as through authenticity I hope to make a true and lasting connecting to the audience through my work.

Another slip experiment, dish cloths dipped in slip and fired.

These have come out better than expected, i expected them to be a pile of dust because of the woven texture of the cloth. I think this looks really great photographed with the label placed back around it, really life-like.

This is really really fragile, it crumbles really easily due to the texture of the cloth, unsure if this will be able to be displayed. Perhaps a glazing would strengthen it but im not sure if it would withstand the glaze being painted on.

Krista Van der Neit

Krista’s still life photography often includes fruits and vegetables mixed with pieces of clothes. Her images tend to have sarcastic references about pop culture and consumerism.

For this final I think I want to evoke an element of the uncanny so i think the more realistic looking bottle works best. I want the audience to have that sense of anxiety that can come with the uncanny, it is a familiar sight for people, and such caddies often evoke comfort for people, but on closer inspection this caddy contains elements that subvert reality, making the audience question their understanding of it.

What questions could this piece evoke?

What would it be like to live in a world where these products were needed?

With 70 artists and respected curator Hou Hanru at the helm, Biennale de Lyon’s 10th show has enough art and energy to connect to a global audience.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetics-of-everyday/

If ‘everyday’ is characterized as the familiar, ordinary, commonplace, and routine, regardless of the specific content that varies from people to people depending upon their lifestyle, occupation, living environment, and other factors, what makes its aesthetic appreciation possible? The following response dominates everyday aesthetics discourse: the aesthetic appreciation of everyday life requires defamiliarization, making strange, or casting an aura. Because we are most of the time preoccupied by the task at hand in our daily life, practical considerations mask the aesthetic potential of commonplace objects and ordinary activities. Furthermore, such experiences lack any coherent structure consisting of unity, pervasive character, and a clear beginning and an end. In short, according to Dewey, our everyday humdrum proceeds mechanically without any internal organic evolution, hence “anesthetic.” Only when we have an experience with all the structural requirements fulfilled does our everyday life gain aesthetic merit.

Once we have an experience with a different attitude and perceptual gear and/or a cohesive internal structure, we can unearth latent aesthetic values in the most ordinary and routine. Mundane objects can acquire a kind of ‘aura’ that heightens their aesthetic value.

According to this interpretation, what is new about everyday aesthetics is its illumination of those aspects of our lives that are normally neglected or ignored because they are eclipsed by standout aesthetic experiences we often have with works of art and nature. More careful attention and a different mindset can reveal a surprisingly rich aesthetic dimension of the otherwise mundane, non-memorable, ordinary parts of our daily life.

The emergence of everyday aesthetics discourse parallels the increasing attempt at blurring the distinction between art and life in today’s artworld. Although there have been many examples throughout art history of depicting slices of everyday life, such as Dutch still life paintings, twentieth-century art introduced and experimented with different modes of appropriating everyday life, most famously with the use of ready-mades. Since then, artists have been trying to overcome the presumed separation between art and real life in a number of ways: rejecting the art institutional setting as a location for their art; denying the necessity of authorial authority; embracing various changes made to their works both by nature and human agency; blurring the creator/spectator dichotomy by collaborating with the general public to create art as a joint venture; changing the role of the artist from the creator/choreographer to a facilitator who provides an occasion or an event for things to happen; literally improving the environment and society by planting trees, cleaning a river, and playing the role of a social worker to promote a dialogue among people in conflict; and engaging in mundane activities like cooking and farming with tangible products for consumption.

product shots

Have been working with Alex to get these ‘product shots’ of my cleaning product range.

Really pleased with these outcomes, i think they look like realistic and showcase the products well, this context definitely moves them from art object to consumer product which is what I wanted.

These products exist in an imagined world where our mental health occupies a physical space as opposed to a mental one. Anxiety would grow like mildew on the walls of our houses, waxing and waning, depending on our personal level of angst. I wanted to explore what the effect of consumerism would be on this phenomena, how would our hyper consumerist world work to capitalize on this?

My vision is these products, in this they sell our anxiety back to us, pre-packaged and ready to buy.

Finalised compositions

Playing about with different final compositions for this piece; 3 different versions of the anxiety attack bottle and various products and accessories ive made for the series. I feel a product has three steps in its life span...

1. the big marketing campaign - Selling you the idea

2. its place in supermarket - The idea becomes real and commodified

3. the domestic setting - the object gets put to use - does it satisfy what you need it too?

As finals i think id like to explore all of these because i think they each show a different relationship to the object and the consumer.

I wanted to display them in this caddy to explore these products as domestic objects. When consumable goods are brought into the domestic setting they become apart of our everyday, they become intimate objects.

This piece was developed from an ongoing investigating into how we view and interact with anxiety within our society. It resides in an imagined world where our mental health occupies a physical space as opposed to a mental one. Anxiety would grow like mildew on the walls of our houses, waxing and waning, depending on our personal level of angst, and as a result consumerism has developed a way of capitalising on this by selling us products to eradicate this.

For alot of people their cleaning caddy is a source of comfort, as cleaning allows them a way to cope with their anxiety. I think composing the products in this way is almost a fine portrait, elevating an everyday object to a revered thing, honouring the little ways in which people cope with mental health on a daily basis and also showcasing what many of these practises are covering up.

I wasnt sure if i liked how the glaze had been applied to the green parts of the lid so ive tried covering it with a green paint marker, i quite like this effect i think it mimics the look of plastic that a real bottle would have. Also a bit tidier and neater than the glazed look - enhances the uncanny life-like look of the bottle.

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