#ongoing research

[crumbwinner]

not a lot of smilers out today… majorly disappointing... will smile again tomorrow and report back with those results…

[grayravenartjournal]

Some photos from my trip to 2 local galleries as part of a seminar at university exploring curatorial practices

[grayravenartjournal]

putting an content warning on this for imagery relating to autopsies. some digital sketchbook things for exploring ideas, ill put some thoughts under the cut.

these thoughts have been dictated and are mostly unedited:

"I did do some work in the studio yesterday after I got some materials from the tech including a really large roll of paper, which I think is going to be really helpful for thinking about scale and the size of things I want to work in. I did I have some help drawing around myself because I like the idea of figurative things being people sized. I think with the type of work that I make like it helps situated and helps build that sense of unease and uncanny, or abjection if this is something not necessarily life like but life-size. if it has a sense of bodiness it's easier as a viewer to draw comparisons between yourself and the work if it's not far off of your actual height and size.

So I've started thinking about where wolves and werewolf transformation I think attacks that I'm going to refer back to a lot is 'werewolves is queer, queer as werewolves, and queer werewolves', which sort of it covers like a little bit of like the brief history of the werewolf and how it can be read as queer. - and I like that it considers like how that queerness can be from the werewolf's point of view as well as from an outside observer."

-

"I'd also like to make a quick aside from where wolves into Still thinking about. The idea of medicalization and score imagery and the imagery of goal in my work. What I've been doing in the studio is drawing near-ish a life sized figure drawings. And one of the things that is currently running through my head is Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. I've seen that image repurposed in. Supernatural films and media before to show Like bodily transformation into lycanthropes and also vampires, but It has been used as an example of like Transforming into Werewolf.

And That also kind of made me think of in vivisection and cabinets of Curiosity's. - And, Sort of museum taxidermy, which also Kind of led me down the line of, like plastification.

I saw ones at a museum, they are bodies that were donated to science and preserved with plastic and resin. It's some of the best research we have on the human body, but I was thinking like What kind of corpse do I want to leave behind? How would that corpse be perceived by The people that find my body or the medical professionals that Register my death?..."

-

"And I was also thinking About, Kind of, the ways to evidence lycanthropy, if there is Damage done to the body every transformation. if there's A little bit of the wolf left behind in the human body. If you can never truly transform back. If the human leaves an impression on the wolf and the wolf leaves an impression on the human. 

So I'm kind of playing with The imagery of autopsy scars and Cadaver reconstruction. Just thinking about that right now. 

It's also way that I'm like thinking about methods of display along with curiosity cabinets like. Is there a way that I could display a 2D image of A body or a werewolf like on A slab, In a medical setting, and playing with those dimensions again. also changing up my ways of display, Could I do Body parts or smaller specimens and put them in like wet specimen jars. I suppose through this I'm also thinking about mis-en-scene and, Like, Scene creation. Universe creation. The suspension of disbelief. But that's something that I'll continue to think about and play out later, I think."

[grayravenartjournal]

Tutorial 3 took place from home due to my boiler braking and the cold making everyone sick. The bus strike is still ongoing, but I wasn’t able to get anyone to bring me in either because of illness.

Really articulate in group crit.

Positive experience.

Studio work

Really likes the photo arms in the collage.

• Different registers

○ Straight paper/arms/painting

• Brings in another language, the photographic, in relation to painted rib cage

Adding digital background still makes it different to it in situe

Everything gets flattened in digital space

Bringing it into space for crit brings physicality. A gentleness and vulnerability.

Being forced into home makes interesting work, but you need to stay aware of that.

There’s something about dis/assembling and moving around to make a new thing.

Need to work on writing to share the richness of ideas.

Tech document

Communication to a technician how things are installed if you’re not there.

Process of research.

Not just technical, the process of display often affects the concept - especially if you can see display

Display has different connotations.

Do you want it to be read as explicit or unknown? How does that add to the work?

What happens at the join? How are you putting together a hybrid? How does that affect display?

Renaissance sculpture that becomes more like reliefs rather than sculptures. Bennini - can’t be moved because they’re so fragile, movement.

Bodied, stone, earth and its relationship to the ephemeral.

[grayravenartjournal]

Nov 02 23. Tutorial 2, year 3 semester 1. Taken directly from journal.

Macro/mirco, scaling bodies. Not another character but making something strange in of itself

'I am my body unwillingly'

Decartes ideas of dualism, the body and the mind as separate things.

I am my body, I am seen in society according to my body. I am my mind, my mind pilots my body, dysphoria means that often I am painfully aware of the physicallity of my body. I have to change my body so that it matches my brain, making them more separate from eachother, bringing them together.

Richard senate, how the city is read and made through the physical body and social body. Rome and Paris[enlightenment]

Disorder, personal identity and city life.

https://thesleepofrigour.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/richard-sennett-the-public-realm-borders-and-boundaries/

Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City In Western Civilization

https://librarysearch.northumbria.ac.uk/primo-explore/search?query=any,contains,Richard%20Sennett%20Flesh%20and%20Stone:%20The%20Body%20and%20the%20City%20In%20Western%20Civilization&tab=default_tab&search_scope=default_scope&sortby=date&vid=northumbria&facet=frbrgroupid,include,2699023211&offset=0

Your panning in and out, moving micro and macro from the body and politics

- Similar methods to second year with the clown, photocopying, enlarging, painting from the enlargement and then scanning that in

Are there ways to make more immediate work?

Post human, replicated, authentic self [sketchbook work]

Figures with additional arms/breasts/body parts look like ancient fertility statues

- Could this be added to your ideas of a beastiary? Could you design an alter/pantheon type of set up for submission

- Might be the progression from work titles last year, 'god is a man like me'

[grayravenartjournal]

12.10.23

First tutorial of the semester, year 3 notes. Notes taken direct from journal without formatting.

Wetness at a thing in of itself

Wet ontology

The wet is in flux

Chewing paper, paper can melt and e reformed, then it will set

Mutability, of change.

Helen chadwick, on mutability, rotting food.

Piss flowers

Inside/out - duality, literal, imagery, psychological

Feels like theres a sense of performativity by proxie, dolls, clowns etc.

Transhuman, more than human. Technology.

Cindy sherman, later work, grotesque. Prosthetics/maniquins/parts.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/199603

Cindy Sherman

Untitled #244

1991

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/56490

Cindy ShermanUntitled #1531985

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/55647

Cindy ShermanUntitled #2281990

Abstract the body, ideas of the body.

How are you setting your environment up to work in a certain way.

Objects can ventriliquise what you want to say, staged or tangential.

Does the image of the body get in the way of what you want to say?

Donna harraway, feminist/new materialist, story telling for earthly survival [film]

Horror research group in researchers at uni doing a show at university gallery soon

[grayravenartjournal]

Group tutorial 1. Early October 2023.

Transcription of a description of my work.

“Yeah I'm [REDACTED], my pronouns are he/him. I work primarily in wet mediums, I think that's how I would describe it - like paint and ink.

Last year, I did do some work with textiles, like fabric too. And some sort of paper-mache and, like, caulk and stuff. - So, I was playing around with, like, a lot of things to, like, sort of push the limits of my happiness to use other things, but I do-I do prefer painting kind of art and I feel like things are missing if I have to do something else, like exclusively, 'cause I've tried to be, like, a little bit less rigid in like my thinking of how I make things and explore different ways of making things, but it does feel like slightly lacking if I can't paint too.

So, like, yeah - so, I know that that's what does it for me.

Last year, I was looking at depersonalization, gender dysphoria, and body dysmorphia using kind of gothic/horror/macabre imagery to get the, kind of, point across. Some of them had violent elements, of gender transition, even if they're like positive things.

I'm quite a macabre person, so for me, like, doing things 'violently' isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think that it makes for an interesting thing to look at.

This year, 'cause I really like the way that I was producing last year, I'm gonna be, sort of like, looking similarly. Trying to so in a way that links my extended research project with the work that I'm making in the studio. So overall, going to be looking at, so it's like queer monsters, monstrous bodies in particular, looking at werewolves as metaphor for gender transition or vampires as a creature, a queer creature”.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Research request! If you have a photo of a sign from an AZA zoo that discusses Species Survival Programs, I’d like to see it! You can send it as an ask, in a message, or reblog and add it. TIA (also please tell me where it is from if it’s not clear!)