The focus of my experimentation and research in assessment 3 was on the way that we perceive gender as a society, how that impacts how we see and interact with each other, and the possibility for creating the gender neutral. My experiments were mostly conducted using surveys and the interaction of others to help and understand and represent the ideas and points of view of a variety of individuals. This is really what shaped the way that my artworks were formed. Artwork 1 centered on the representation of gender in the media and stereotypes that stem from these cultural understandings. The work comprised of 2 illustrations, one surrounding masculine culture, and the other around feminine. Here the drawings and perceptions of 4 different people were combined through a coloured pencil drawing, portraying commonly held stereotypes for each gender. This lead to a desire to experiment and explore the idea of gender signifiers and how people perceive a link between shape and gender. The personification of several household objects led to the creation of Artwork 2, a shadow work featuring a number of different objects and projecting their shadows onto a black wall. The images became genderless human representations with the addition of movement to the work. This led to the experimentation to create the gender void, questioning whether the human form can ever be depicted void of gender. Here the final artwork came from wanting to break down the human body into its base functions, through depicting the human skeleton, with the additions of facts about the average functioning of the human body. The final artwork was a layered Perspex piece with several hand cut organs, one on each layer. Overall I believe that learning this process focused on active experimentation is important to the development of an art piece, past its basic and primary level, towards becoming a unique, well informed, and realized piece of work.
