FMP 2017 @theseplastics-blog - Tumblr Blog

When a bare mattress becomes your workstation and you get disproportionately excited at 4am about the fact that your art matches your duvet covers

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I like using this cloudy soap a lot! Opacity gives the little objects more weight

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Prototype for final outcome

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soap experiment 3

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This is the first bar I used dried plants in. I intended to use the embeds whirled around underneath the dolls and the bar of clay in the centre to create a dynamic of tension between the 3 figures, who I imagined as having some kind of relationship through text messaging; the bar in the centre is a deliberately crude representation of a digital text message bubble. I might develop this kind of scene to include figures who are visually coded as some kind of gay woman archetypes. I think this would be a deeply unsettling and potentially quite evocative way of depicting an obsession with imaginary relationships between people and/or places and objects.

This is definitely the piece out of the 3 I made during this session that I find the most nightmarish. The mixture of hard, smooth, porous, absorbent, degradable, film-like and frothy materials and textures gives this one a sense of something unstable frozen in movement for me. Leaving parts of the objects sticking out through the surface adds to the depth of the bar, making it look heavier and potentially more like an imagined version of a real larger space. It also adds to the sense of the figures being trapped, which is especially horrific in the case of the figure with more defined facial features; this one begins to suggest the image of some kind of beached dead body for me, or similar. This is not a direction I am particularly comfortable exploring - I definitely want the figures to appear either inanimate or like living things, not like posthumously arranged corpses. I didn’t start any of this work thinking about death.

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I washed these figures out of the soap I embedded them in before, but couldn’t completely remove the hardened soap or they would’ve fallen to pieces. They are quite hard to the touch. I’d be interested in getting more figures to stand up on their own after covering them this way; I find the textures especially appealing with this muslin, which dried much darker in the sections weighed down by soap.

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Soap experiment 2

I inadvertently made these ripples in the surface here by trying to move embeds around immediately after pouring the melted soap. I kind of like this weird tension; I feel like this could some of the trapped objects a some movement. I’d like to try moving the dolls around under the surface to define some simple spatial relationship between them, by moving them so they seem to pull away from each other, for example.

I tried to scrape away at the surface of the soap layer over this dolls’ jumper I sewed. This didn’t work at all; it left fine scratch marks and even more uneven surfaces. For whatever reason this is now truly revolting to me, which I kind of anticipated and hoped for - ultimately I do want to make these objects a little unsettling, since I’m thinking about communicating a sense of being trapped on the outside of something. The soft of the woven fabric absorbs the harsh drying chemical fluid, which appears coagulated and opaque in parts; the folds in the fabric are made stiff and locked in place. The fact that this piece of material has been hand sewn as an item of clothing and therefore could belong to someone makes this more visceral for me. I think it could come across as quite violent to encase a whole fabric doll this way; I’m not sure yet that this is what I want.

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Soap experiment 1

This one didn’t work out that well. I hadn’t anticipated that the soap wouldn’t be perfectly clear, so I pushed some of the embeds quite deep into the soap mold; I ended up obscuring the forms way too much so the figures don’t look like figures and the little text message speech bubble doesn’t look like anything. i had also surrounded them with little hearts like tumblr ‘likes’, but all of these got obscured.

You can’t really see it in this picture, but I think that white clay coloured with coloured pencils looks pretty interesting - it’s impossible to uniformly colour something so tiny with a pencil, and the clay is a little resistant to the wax, so it comes up looking like a 3D crayon drawing whatever you do. The colour shows up very brightly, and the scribbled marks definitely feel playful - I might be able to use this to tone down the eeriness of my dolls’ faces, for example, and make them look as much like loved playthings as disturbing poppets to be used in some imaginary sorcery.

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Something else in progress. A space. This was supposed to be a quick one drawing up a scene with the figures, thinking about images I can use to create imaginary relationships between them and give them individual roles and character. I want them to have some kind of power by implicating them as representations of real people.

I couldn’t figure out a way to create an image of a kind of virtual paradise garden that is at once too dark and too unsettlingly high-key to feel like a comfortable space for the figures that inhabit it. I think I need to add some layers of bright cobalt blues underneath black or brown or green in the water; maybe subtle low-polygon-looking plant life on the tiny island might help to put this in context, too.

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This one’s not perfect at all, but I’m making these transparencies of my pressed flowers in GIMP to make animations or digital paintings with them and my 3D modelled dolls’ heads. I want to merge the very dimensional and textural elements of these natural objects and cutout images of the dolls’ fabrics with very pristine and symmetrical digitally generated imagery. I might cut-and-paste digital heads onto cloth bodies in landscapes dense with these plant forms, for instance. This could serve as a very stylised and dreamlike public version of imaginary scenes I fantasise about as a substitute for real meaningful interactions with the kind of people I feel most connected to - gay women, that is.

These could be hosted online as pages that strangers could visit and interact with, and as finished works in their own right, but I’m unfamiliar at the moment with the platforms I might use and any coding techniques I might need to learn. For now they will serve as still images which exist to be intruded on online but also provide a 2D basis for paintings or objects I might create with real materials in a fleshed-out imitation of these interfaces.

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Exporting 3D modelled images into GIMP and playing around with effects and bucket tools had some interesting results. This might be a way to flatten out these images enough to start painting from them and possibly framing them as questions about painting in themselves.

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Miltos Manetas, SuperMario Sleeping, 1997

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FMP 2017