Reflective Journal

Ba1b reflection

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Lecture Notes

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Fairies

Barker, C.M. (1997) The complete book of the flower fairies : poems and pictures by Cicely Mary Barker.London: Frederick Warne.

Doyle, R. (1979) Fairy Land : a series of pictures from the elf-world. London: Michael Joseph.

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Photomontage

Ades, D. (1976) Photomontage. London: Thames And Hudson. p.129

‘Ernst, Baargeld and Höch, for instance, already in their Dada photomonages, disrupt, truncate or replace parts of the body, rendering the familiar strange.’

Pleiades, 1921 - by Max Ernst

‘For Ernst eroticism was another way of entering the unconscious, of escaping from convention, and possibly of tweaking bourgeois taste. But he was aware that adult sexuality had its limits, as is apparent in the exquisite Pleiades… (1921). A photograph of a nude, faceless girl floats in a blue space stratified by horizontal lines, suggesting water or the sky. A few strangely disparate forms surround the girl, and the short text at the bottom ends, “The gravitation of the undulations does not yet exist.” The title, this line, and the fact that the girl floats in space rather than standing on the ground - as most of Ernst’s figures do - suggests that he sees in pubescence a kind of weightless freedom.‘

Hannah Höch, 1929, Foreign Beauty

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Cosey Fanni Tutti

From the June and July 1977 issues of British porn magazine Fiesta. Images provided by Fiesta magazine.https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/gqdvg7/cosey-fanni-tutti-597-v17n11

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Week 17 (5th - 11th February)

I look photos of natural settings for the backgrounds of my collages.

I inked over this on to add a painterly feel and to add to the theme of fantasy. That this place doesn’t actually exist.

I bought an old Vogue magazine, scanned in an image of this model and then photoshopped her onto the new background. I also gave her wings from a Cecil Mary Baker fairy illustration. I wanted to use women from lads’ mag though as there is more of a liberating feel when doing this than with a model.

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Week 16 (29th January - 4th February)

This week I worked on editing my outcomes from the Hybrid Workshops. I learnt a lot about how to use the new software such as Premier Pro and Audition. In the first project, we had the audio from ‘Psycho’ so I only edited the clips of the pigeons we filmed. I had a lot of fun trying to put my own spin on the footage the group shot and marrying the audio and visuals together. I used slow motion on a pigeon taking flight and as the frame rate wasn’t high enough it ended up being very stilted but I liked this affect as it seemed to add some kind of dramatic film noir kind of feel to the clip. I also decided to overlay a black and white filter through the whole film to add to that idea, plus playing homage to the original film that accompanied the audio. I only successfully exported it this week as last week I got the file type wrong.

This week we had stock footage supplied and instead we had to create the audio to go with it. In all honesty, I enjoyed editing together the stock footage in interesting ways more than I enjoyed creating the audio for the project. We used a computer-generated voice to read sections of poetry we found in the university library. The main poem I chose to feature in my project is Howl by Allen Ginsberg, which is one of my favourite poems. I liked the contrast of the unemotional computer voice with the raw, human beat poetry. My favourite visual part of the project is how I overlaid the fish swimming in the fish bowl over the spinning blue sphere of the earth. I personally derived some deeper meaning in that moment; being confined in the world as the fish is by its bowl. I enjoyed finding clips that correlated with the sounds, i.e. static or wind with the sounds of a hand dryer, sounds of a tap running for the fish and the stream. I wanted a moment of tranquillity when the sunny day and tree clip came on so I brought down the noise sound completely and only had the ambience sounds of the library underneath the poetry.

Cicely Mary Barker: The complete book of the flower fairies : poems and pictures by Cicely Mary Barker Richard Doyle: Fairy Land : a series of pictures from the elf-world I also scanned in some fairytale illustrations to overlay on some multimedia works.

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Week 15 (22nd - 28th January)

I went to two life drawing classes and here are the results from them. I now want to incorporate them into my own collages so they can inhabit the fantasy world I want to create.

I had the idea of transforming the life models into fairies. Here I used a scan from an erotic magazine and wings from one of the flower fairy books. Suddenly I think the image becomes purer or liberated (?).

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Week 14 (15th - 22nd January)

I decided to explore a theme I'd looked at in the past: childhood. I first focused on the fairy ornaments that I grew up with around the house. I thought it went well with the ideas of fantasy I wanted to address in the way the female form is represented. I also like the idea of the escapism of the fantasy linking to the idea of transcending the physical form that I mentioned in my statement of intent.

I looked at Cicely Mary Barker's fairies and decided to recreate them in my own style. Here's the experimentation:

Hybrid Workshop

Films

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Week 13 (8th - 14th January)

I started looking at the idea of fantasy – fairy books, Cecily Mary Barker, Arthur Rackham Layering Photos Source material Charcoal, ink Paintings Bad Girls and Sick Boys Cosi fanni tutti 

Kauffman, L.S. (1998) Bad girls and sick boys : fantasies in contemporary art & culture. Berkeley: California Unversity Press. 

Barker, C.M. (1997) The complete book of the flower fairies : poems and pictures by Cicely Mary Barker.London: Frederick Warne. 

 Doyle, R. (1979) Fairy Land : a series of pictures from the elf-world. London: Michael Joseph.