Helpful feedback last month on my creative test pieces.  One important point which struck me was that some of my work seen as being literal and some more philosophical. Literal work allows less space for the audience to form their own ideas and opinions and to make their own sense of my work. My tutor described this as beginning and ending with the description of the idea. This isn’t always something I find easy as there is an element here about losing control and about ownership of the ideas behind my work. I will make a conscious effort to consider this literal/philosophical divide as I present this month’s creative works. In my works below, some are less literal than others. It doesn’t seem to be a black and white choice but more of a sliding scale perhaps. One of my thoughts in this learning environment, how much do I explain my works?  Is the learning environment the same as showing works in a gallery? Do I treat my tutor and assessors as part of the audience or should I go into greater depth describing my thoughts, explaining myself and my meanings and inspirations to my tutor and assessors? I have chosen to treat my educators as a different type of audience. In so doing, I realise that in describing my thoughts about a work, I give my own sense of what my works mean to me which in turn might limit or shape the philosphical element for this audience and turn the dial towards more literal works.

My works this month expand on previous works where I was looking at the passage of time, what happens should the dead be forgotten or lost and how, even after the death memorial has decayed or vanished, ideas might survive beyond the memory of a real living person.  I have created works both within the formal graveyard setting and I also look at the idea of memorials outwith the graveyard.

My first work re-imagines the burial space. I have used a found photograph of the island on which Princess Diana is buried. I have imagined this island changing as the memory of the individual changes and as the memory of the loss fades. I am less than interested in her fame but am intrigued by public response to her death and funeral and why, for some, the response to her death was such a huge outpouring of grief way beyond what might be expected for someone whom I imagine most didn’t even know.  I have imagined her burial place as a water park. After a period of time has elapsed and the use of this space and how people remember what this space once was, might change. I used this idea to interrogate the idea of loss set against time, fading memories and different opinions. I have set the photograph of the island burial against the sea where water is swirling in a whirlpool. This vortex to me encompasses the stress and confusion and feeling of being emptied which is tightly related to loss and grief. I used an image showing sunbathers on a cruise ship and crudely cut these out and surrounded them with rough hand drawn outline of a ship. This outline of a ship reminds me of the faint outline of a grave uncovered by an archaeological dig. I imagined these people at play, sunbathing or playing on boats and whether they think of the island as a burial space as they enjoyed themselves. I did consider a reduction of this piece of work and just showing the island with the blow-up pink flamingo. Would that be too simplistic or a more challenging construct for the audience? It has crossed my mind to wonder if I overwork my ideas at times. Something for me to think on.

In my second work this month, I explore the idea of family memory. I photographed a local memorial bench with plaques. The bench faces the sea but I have photographed it looking backwards towards the land. Behind the bench I have placed a family wedding photograph from a collection I purchased online and where I do not know any of the lost people in the image. The people are also facing the sea. I have always found it strange that if I sit in such seats I lean against the message which is then hidden from me. It might be said I am sharing the view with the dead as if they sitting beside me. In my image I imagine the wedding group sharing that same view. As they are behind me if I was in that seat, it speaks of those who went before but there is also that sense of figures behind and feeling of hairs standing up on the back of my neck. One other thing about this image is the worn ground in front of the bench, stripped of grass down to the sandy soil. I debated putting something into this space but left it bare. It reminded my of freshly disturbed ground as if for newly dug grave.

As part of my work for this exercise I thought about and photographed things which might be memorials and, in a different circumstance, could be. I haven’t developed any of these images into resolved ideas at this stage. My potential memorials include things such as tree stumps, water hydrant markers, electrical boxes, a poster for a lost pet and a water depth gauge on harbour wall photographed at a very low tide.

I want to add one more image which caught my eye. I found this on Instagram.

I deliberately didn’t investigate the story behind this because I just wanted the unresolved image with the unanswered questions it asks.

The ‘gone too soon’ and ‘we kiss forever’ messages and the crying emojis speak of loss but at the same time why are the men standing over what seems to be an empty grave? Does their dress and manner speak of loss? Why do the men stand alone at an open grave? Are there other mourners? From a photographic sense, who took this image?

I don’t know if I could use this image or even if I would want to but this was very interesting to me with my work on memorialising the dead. In this case the memorial was the page on Instagram and, if I had looked for them, any comments attached to the image.

 

My next worked example moves away from the idea of a grave to that of some kind of memorial hung on wall at home or even an artwork on the wall of a gallery. This piece is a meeting point of different streams from my background and with my current research in that it mixes medical imaging, physics, death and how death is remembered, recorded and displayed.

Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered x-rays in the 1890s. He won the very first Nobel prize for Physics and the legacy unit of measurement for the exposure of x-rays and gamma rays was named in his honour. As I looked into Roentgen’s history, I was struck by the word exposure. A simple word which made me think of a photographic exposure or the exposure to potentially lethal radioactivity or the exposure to loss and how it changes us. The first x-ray Roentgen produced is that of the hand of his wife showing her finger bones and the ring she was wearing.

I started looking at some more notable graves after my work last month re-imagined the grave of Karl Marx. Roentgen’s family grave is just another unremarkable grave so I wondered about using the x-ray combined with the gravestone or even combining the grave with an image I found of the results of a ground penetrating radar plot. The image I found shows results in a search for unmarked graves. This kind of radar can can be used with gamma rays for the detection of radiation sources and so in a science sense is derivative of Roentgen’s work. However, I couldn’t find a suitable way to combine the grave image with the radar image nor an adequate reason to combine these and, as I write this explanation of the connection between this radar image and Roentgen, I realise that it seems contrived and long winded.

 

I rejected the gravestone itself and stripped back the memorial to a clean white page. To this stark page, I used a modern x-ray image viewer and placed the image of Roentgen’s wife’s x-rayed hand. Next to this I placed an x-ray I found online of a plant which seemed to fit very well with the idea of remembrance and loss. I enjoy the difference in feel of the hard dark of the x-ray of bone against the translucence of plant stems and leaves. I debated whether to put Roentgen’s name on this work but decided to leave it blank and uncluttered. Perhaps a name not required if the person who constructed the memorial was close to Roentgen and his wife. In my piece, hopefully the x-ray of that hand is famous enough to provide a starting point for my audience. The idea of an x-ray of a plant and of mixing the symbolism of plants and flowers with the medical scan, which I think has a close relationship to death imagery, seems a powerful connecting point linking different strands in my work. I have thought about this work and whether it is too simplistic which seemed to come with the territory for me while I was considering literal works and pholosphical works. Does this image speak of death and loss? It can be difficult at times when we create something and it is part of our consciousness as we imagine and develop and then create the work. It is difficult to create a sense of space or distance and look at the work as if I knew nothing about it and I was just a part of the audience.

My final creative work this month is a layered image. This shows an unknown grave in a local graveyard. I took a series of images and have layered these as a way of implying that a graveyard isn’t really a fixed image seen at one instant in time but is a series of views and of memories none of which neatly blends or sits at comfort with other memories of a scene. At the centre of image I have placed a hand held dressing mirror with broken glass at the base of the gravestone. The mirror allows us to look at ourselves and when placed on a grave, asks the living to look at their reflection and to consider their mortality. In this, I was influenced by Batchen with the death memorial of a dressing mirror with photograph of the dead. In his example, the mirror was part of a domestic scene whereas mine is used in a place linked with death. The broken glass in my mirror signifies the imperfection in the photographic image and that it can never convey an entire, complete image of a whole person. Similarly, the memory of anyone is a fragment of the whole.

In one of my photographs I used to construct this layered image, I captured a shadow of myself and show this leading to headstone. I intended this as a sense of a mis-shapen shadow outline of the person visiting the grave, another sense of the image in the mirror. When I was constructing this image it occurred to me that shadow was like the body beneath the turf. One other thing of note, although the stone is very worn, I think I can makeout an hourglass on the gravestone which seems a perfect fit for the feeling of my image.

In my images this month, I struggled with complexity versus simplicity. It seems obvious to me that what might look like a simple visual piece can contain complex ideas but I have struggled with trying to gain perspective and balance to give myself an overview of my work. Maybe in a non-educational setting, this perspective would come through time. On a tight deadline built around demands of the course, I don’t have the luxury of time so have created works and outlined my thoughts and the questions I ask myself as best I can at this stage of my project.