Ted Meyer
“Ted Meyer loves bodies. He loves to paint them, photograph them and even print off them...” “He loves healthy bodies, but also in states of trauma and healing. He creates puzzles of bodies that celebrate sexuality and survival.” -http://www.tedmeyer.com/ (home page)
I find beauty in these artist statements, that could mostly be because I have finally found something that I can relate to when researching for this idea, it could also stem from finding something that I deeply want to work with.
I have never really worked with bodies before, but that sense of identity that comes through the journeys our bodies have gone through in our lifetime, is what I want to heavily explore.
Although Ted Meyer has done a diverse range of projects, his ‘Art and Med’ series is what I really want to focus on. Throughout this series he explores the work of scars. He has what is called the ‘Scarred for Life Project’ and the ‘Scarred for Life Veterans Project’.
The ‘Scarred for Life Project’ is an ever growing series of mono-prints, visually depicting other peoples trauma’s through their scars. He has been creating and documenting people’s scars through mono-print for over sixteen years and now has over one-hundred prints. Adding to this, each print is accompanied by a photo of who the print is of, taken by Ted Meyer, as well as a written by the subjects themselves.
All of this absolutely fascinates me as I have been struggling with my ideas on how to get a footing with all of this but I knew that I wanted to work with scars as well as narratives and written work. Then I type into google ‘Artists that work with scars’ and I eventually come across Ted Meyer who is perfect for what I plan on doing and want to explore more of his work in this unit.
The ‘Scarred for Life Veterans Project’ is similar to the previous one that I described, only is deals with soldiers scars instead which are quite a lot bigger and much more jagged than regular surgery scars, they also usually come with a lot more narrative too.
This will heavily influence my work, but I worry that I will end up with the same outcome, I’m not sure if that’s entirely a bad thing, but I don’t want to be accused of copying him. To be fair to myself, I did come up with this concept before I found out about Ted Meyer. Maybe I’ll take it a step further and for the next unit, compose a documentary interview either about the work that I have done for this unit, or documenting the people I used and interviewing them on their story.
