POST 7

New Walk Museum Exhibition - A Journey Out of Darkness
German Expressionists.

http://www.leicester.gov.uk/your-council-services/lc/leicester-city-museums/exhibitions/german-expressionist/ajourney/

We went on a trip to the New Walk Museum in Leicester to see the exhibition of German Expressionist art - A Journey Out of Darkness. I really enjoyed this exhibition I was immediately sucked in by two of the artists Beckmann and Dix...

Max Beckmann

The Yawners 1918 - grabbed my eye again with the repetition of faces and similar expressions.


Group Portrait Eden Bar 1923 - The texture and aggressive technique used to create this piece is what caught my eye the most. Linking back to the mental illness ideas of scribbles.

Prunier 1944 - Colours and scribbles

Carnival Mask, Green Violet and Pink 1950 - I think this idea of masking my subject and keeping their identity would work really well, like back in the photographs by Anna Linderstam I looked at before.

Otto Dix

Whore and War Cripple 1923 - again the aggressive 'scribble' technique of creating this drawing gives me ideas for my video.

Self-Portrait as Mars 1915 - this painting really caught my eye, it makes me think of all the chaos going on inside your mind and putting it into a self-portrait.

Creature of The Night 1923

Ellis 1922 - These two paintings above are again in a 'double exposure' style overlaying different techniques and media. I am going to explore this in my editing of my video.

POST 6

Mental Disease and Repetition

I went to the library and got loads of books out this week. I found a few on Art and Mental Disease which have interested me looking through the paintings and drawings...

Book - Outsiders, an art without precedent or tradition - Arts Council of Great Britain 1979

Oswald Tschirtner - A soldier in World War II on the Russian front, later a prisoner in France. When he reached home in 1946 he was found to be schizophrenic, and has been hospitalised ever since. He draws only at his doctor's instigation, in a radically schematic style with elongated figures and expressive repetitions.

I have noticed this common occurrence in this art that repetition is a key process. I want to explore this further in my work to try and create tension with repetition, maybe used more in my video than in my stills interpretations.

Book - Artistic Self-Expression in Mental Disease, J.H.Plokker.

'The drawings in which we cannot really speak at all of designing will be described as scribbles. They occur both in acute schizophrenic conditions of agitation and in cases which have become chronic, which create an impression of being dead. In the first case, we are often stuck by the great tension under which the work has been carried out.'

I like this idea of showing the aggression and tension in art. I could maybe use this idea of scribbling aggressively and frantically in my video along with other elements, to represent how these feelings are put onto paper.

'It often occurs that a patient will draw long rows of heads or other figures on one sheet, these showing little if any variations. Or they will reproduce the same small scene in an identical manner several times in juxtaposition, they suddenly introducing a small variation by adding or omitting an element, then returning again to the old stereotyped pattern.'

I also like this overlapping of images almost in a double exposure idea with paint. I could use this idea also in my video by overlapping other images or text to create a deeper effect on the viewer. Cramming more information quicker to make the mind work faster and build up tension.

POST 5

Video

For the video part of this project I want to create an uncomfortable feeling, maybe using similar ideas to the ones I have researched in stills.
I have been looking at videos from the Aggressive Film Corporation (www.afco.tv) I have come across this video which inspires me, it makes me feel uncomfortable and almost scared. I feel anxious watching it, I love the idea behind it but I would want the surroundings to be darker and the frame to be tighter, close up.
The sound doesn't make me feel as uneasy as I would like it to but it is a very inspiring and clever concept.

Dreamt In Flesh - Short film by Ian Pons Jewell, starring Marie Gabrielle Rotie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRIb2Er9Ckw

POST 4

Emotionally Drained, Collapse

Anna Linderstam
In search of the Unfathomable text by Bridget Coaker - 1000 Words Photography Magazine

The concept of exhausting the model to point of collapse intrigues me. Another of the feelings I have... sensation of being weighed down and heavy.

I also like the idea of using simple plain underwear, no identity just physical representation of a feeling and emotion. The simple plain tights show the inner basic vulnerability of the subject. No clothes = no armour/protection.

Again there is no identity shown in the photographs I have picked out of this series... no faces, just backs. Which I think expresses and emphasises the posture and body shapes in an inspiring, mysterious way.

POST 3

Restricting Ropes

Nobuyoshi Araki
Book - Araki By Araki

'Why is bondage a recurrent in your work?'(asked by Jerome Sans)

'Kinbaku - Making knots with ropes, is different from bondage. I tie women's bodies up because I know their souls can't be tied. Only the physical self can be tied. Putting a rope around a woman is like putting an arm around her.'(Araki)

I find Araki's work captivating, I interpret the photographs in my own way, bringing them into my own meaning. I look at the technique used not the erotic positions and situations the women are in. I look at it with the idea and the feeling of being restricted - not actually by ropes but by emotions and thoughts.

This last photo is my favorite as it simply is a woman after the ropes have been taken away, but that could be represented from my point of view as her breaking free from depression and anxiety or it could imply the rope being what it is in feeling - invisible.

I want to explore this idea in my own research, showing different ideas and examples of how to translate feeling into image.

POST 2

Shadows, Darkness, Suffocating.
Camille Vivier
Art Photography Now - Susan Bright (p148-149) Photos from the series Camille, 2003

Camille Vivier is an artist and filmmaker who works in fashion.
'I try to show things, a spirit, whilst at the same time allowing them to have an opaqueness and an element of enigma. What really interests me is how a mental image can take form in a real one.' - Camille Vivier.

I love the darkness and shadows in these photographs. In the first photograph I feel tension, it makes me feel uncomfortable and almost suffocated by the dress the model is in. The cold temperature of the lighting in both photographs combined with the darkness and the heavy shadows really sucks me in, it makes me ask what are they doing or thinking, it makes me look closer at the details of the surroundings and expression. Both photos to me represent a vacant exhausted look.

The first photograph reminds me of a strait jacket - fitting in with my subject of depression and mental illness.

A straitjacket is a garment shaped like a jacket with overlong sleeves and which is typically used to restrain a person who may otherwise cause harm to him/herself and others. The ends of the sleeves can be tied to the back of the wearer, so that the arms are kept close to the chest with possibility of only little movement. - Wikipedia

From looking at Bianca Brunner, Sam Taylor-Wood and Camille Vivier I want to explore an idea further; the feeling of being restricted to move and suffocated and representing it in a literal photographic form.

POST 1

Transitional Spaces - my transitional space - my mind.

I want to research and explore Depression. I have chosen this subject because it is personal to me as I have suffered from it from very young age.

I have started by looking through lots of photography books and picking out photographs that stand out to me with what I want to explore...


Bianca Brunner
reGeneration - 50 photographers of tomorrow (p52-53) Photo from the series Limbo, 2004







The idea of wading through the water in clothes reminds me of the feeling of walking on a bad day, feeling the weight of everything around you and feeling uncomfortable and struggling to get to places.

Limbo - from the concise Oxford Thesaurus
Unbaptised infants are thought to live in limbo: non-existence, void, oblivion.
In Limbo - in abeyance, unattended to, unfinished; suspended, deferred, postponed, put off, pending, on ice, in cold storage; unresolved, undetermined, up in the air.

- this word limbo inspires me, for me it sums up a lot of the feelings I have. Limbo is a place no one knows but you can create it, it may be different for every person. It may come after death or during life (depression).

Sam Taylor-Wood
Art Photography Now - Susan Bright (p30-31) Photos from the series of self-portraits Suspended, 2004

Taylor-Wood's self-portraits often reflect significant chapters in her like and are markers for change or progression. They form an important autobiographical thread which weaves through her overall practice. With personal and often brutally honest images, she shares with the audience emotional and revealing narratives that touch on issues such as her role as an artist and her feelings towards the art world. - Art Photography Now - Susan Bright

'I'm not levitating or falling - I just exist in a kind of dance in the air' - Sam Taylor-Wood

Taylor-wood hired a bondage expert to tie her up and suspend her in the air, this idea has stuck in my head since I saw these photos, it links with this previous photo by Bianca Brunner from 'Limbo' I really like this idea of creating a feeling to look at.