19/10 – This is my initial attempt at pulling together creative choices which will go forwards for assessment. When I do this am thinking of the progression of my work rather than looking for a collection of polished works.

My first thing to consider is whether my early works on this project started in my previous year of study should feature here? I instictively think yes as this makes logical sense to provide a sense of a starting place. However, from an educational and assessment point of view might this be seen as claiming credit for my own word made outwith the boundaries of this unit. After consideration, and assuming this permitted, I have chosen to show this work in this blog post and to explain why and when it was made plus how it relates to my current work. I think I could then create a link to this post for assessors to look at but only send in files worked on in the current year to the assessment team. Hopefully this is a decent compromise.

My next point is that I have provided commentary alongside these images. I hope this isn’t too overpowering.

I had started exploring the medical scan and wondered how I could use these in my work. The scans I use, I had requested from the NHS and show images of my son and daughter and their cancers so there is aways a huge emotional component with my work. The scans I use are removed from the medical setting to the walls of an art gallery.  In the image above I have have coloured and layered brain scans to show a progression from the back to the front of my son’s head echoed by the figure moving across the gallery space.

 

My next work further explored the art gallery setting but this time attempting to shift focus back towards childhood. I used children’s games to try and create this link.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The layering I used in this work was a way to interpret memories and the past and of the sense of a medical scan unpeeling our skin as if we were onions. I experimented with different styles and techniques; working with layers on the computer and creating tactile works to explore how my work might feel differeny if something physical or a digital piece. I felt that the more tactile works could express different senses and feelings in my work as I tried to find ways to shift the context of the medical scan.

These early works were visual trials into how I felt about using scans, with all their emotional baggage, as subjects I used as part of my study. I was concerned that any sense of my children were almost entirely absent. At same time I was unsure whether I wanted to have more of sense of my children in these images. I struggled for a long time over the ethics and morality of using any medical images, not just ones of my own children, as a basis for my creative work. So, these early test pieces in part about testing different techniques but also dealing with the questions and doubts my work raised within myself.

At this early stage of my project, I had not done much in the way of in-depth research  and I didn’t understand how to resolve my project in any satisfactory way. My attempts were creative and emotional rather than research based.These works were a starting point. At this point I had my progression meeting for level 3 which is a dividing line in my work and in my thinking although in actuality level 3 has not been a single dividing line but a whole series of divisions guided by my increasing awareness of my chosen subject, my reseacrh and my trial works. This current year builds upon these early attempts even if I appear to move off in completely unrelated directions.

My research in this current year identified connections between the medical scans and between the symbolism of death. I think, death was always going to feature in my work. My daughter died from cancer, as it happens just 3 days after my mother who suffered from Alzheimers. My son survived his cancers althought they left him badly disabled. As soon as I started to look at death this opened new avenues and gave me a clearer sense of direction. I mention this as my next images are of gravestones and I wanted to explain the connection between those medical scans and my next works.

I tried to re-imagine graves of famous people. I used an image of Street Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s rather plain gravestone and overlaid it with one of his own graffiti images. It felt to me that my rendition of his grave gave a more complete sense of the real person who was remembered by that gravestone. I was starting to explore death, memory and memorials.

 

I worked with Karl Marx’s grave imagining what it might be like if he was forgotten, his gravestone broken and overgrown with weeds and moss . Then I moved away from a direct view of the grave with Wilhelm Roentgen who discovered x-rays. Instead of the grave I used an x-ray image of a plant as a symbol for death alongside an x-ray of Roentgen’s wife’s hand set on a light box.  The feedback I received on this image was something I have given much thought to in that how much space does my work allow the audience to think or am I too literal in my works. An alternative set of images based on this would be to remove the lightbox and the hand and just have a series of x-rays of plants and flowers using the connection between plants and flowers and the symbolism of death and having twist of these shown as x-rays. I have shown my initial submission here.

 

I was interested in exploring the use of props. In this example I used a mirror which I saw as having a photographic meaning but also was a way of trying to put the audience into my images. my example below I used different layers to try and fragment my image and included my own shadow as if it were the figure in the grave.  I think that these attempts took me on a journey, dancing around different aspects of my topic. I have to ask myself why my broken image is presented as it is and whether it is an effective vehicle for promoting my ideas or is it overly visually complex or messy for no apparent reason? The most interesting thing I followed through in subsequent works was my thoughts on how to put an audience into my images or how to make them consider the ideas of death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my later series towards the end of this unit, I chose a single approach and attempted to develop it, trying to move away from some of my broader trials in earlier works. some of which have shown or described above.

This image was first in my series. I was looking at memorial benches with their engraved plaques and thinking about how the person the bench was a memorial to is often forgotten. We sit on that bench and that person often not even in our thoughts. More than that, we sit on the bench and the plaque in behind us. I took an album photograph I had purchased online and added this as a transaprent layer to my photograph of the bench. This to me, hints at sense you sometimes get of someoen stepping on your grave and of hairs standing up on back of your neck. Here the family group stand behind (or before) the bench symbolising all those who have gone before with the worn sandy patch at front of bench showing how well used in life that space is but at same time almost giving idea of a fresh grave.  The ideas which stemmed from this image run off in different directions but this is how I see the work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my next image in the series, I photographed a bench being used with a man sat on it and a child playing next to bench. I photographed bench across a bed of autumn leaves, showing a path and neatly cut grass as a backdrop. I have added an album photograph as a transparent layer with more solid figures from life in front. I was interested in feedback here, as some things I hadn’t considered. The shift from life symbolised by leaf fall and a child and his father and moving outwards across surface of image yet at same time, backwards through time and towards and beyond the barrier beetween life and death with the path almost acting as a River Styx.

I like this series. Why? because it generates the emotion I have been searching for even if it feels a million miles from my starting place of medical scans and my children.

My final image I wanted to show in this series tries to simplify and condense my idea. I have a photograph of a bench with little in the way of background or foreground and with no people yet sprinkled with some autumn leaves. To this I have cut out an old album photograph of a child with a book and added this to image of bench as a transparent layer.  The photograph of the child is old and faded and shows the child perhaps still unsteady on their feet and using the bench as a support. The child looks back at the camera and at the audience. When I presented this image I worried in case it was too simple.  At same time it seems to have a certain haunting quality. Why is the child alone? How does the child relate to the person memorialised by the bench and to the person looking at this image?