UAL Art Foundation : Photomedia and Fine/3D Art Collaboration

Defacing Body Image

For this project I was working in a group of two other people (one other photo media student and a fine art student). We decided to base our project on body image. To get this idea we decided to take the idea from Natalia’s project based on breastfeeding in public, we tool this idea and decided to focus on the female body. We then decided to take the skills Georgia and I shared through film photography. We then started to discuss what we could do with the photos with these links and it was decided to try to portray varied feelings women have of their bodies, by destroying them (creatively), by burning, painting, embroidering, scratching etc.

In doing this we took inspiration from three artists/photographers.

The first artist was Gerhard Richer we took his technique of dragging paint over Images (on a smaller scale). His work Is very much about covering, hiding and filling up space, so this links to views to body image.

Jessa Fairbrother is a photographer that we looked into. She uses mixed media within her work, for example her project ‘conversations with my mother’ where she destroys photos of her mother and herself by burning, embroidering, ripping, placing objects on top as well as other ways to destroy or cover up photos.

We decided to use Annette Messager’s presentation style. We chose to take the hanging collage style as we thought it would look well with the amount of work we were going to produce for this project and even though there is so much going on with the work itself this style looks very put together and makes each individual peace look harmonise with each other.

Burning

Because it was to windy outside we had to go into one of the work rooms with an extraction fan, we burnt both images from the darkroom and digital.

we found that because of the type of paper the darkroom images where on it was easier to control the flames and it also started to bubble and give the photos more texture to it.

Painting

We did a mix of putting the paint on one end of the photo and dragging it across the image with some card, dripping paint onto the image, putting paint at the top of the image and letting it drip down the page, smudging a thin layer of paint around over the image so it isn't covering the image just putting something between the print and the eye.

Different ways to develop

We decided to try different ways to develop the images in the darkroom, so we dripped developer onto the undeveloped images and use a paint developer onto the silver based paper.

Solarisation

Solarisation is a technique that brings out the silver in the photographic paper (done in the darkroom). To do this you expose the Image twice, first you print the image onto the paper, develop it and the put it into cold water. Once this is done you put it back under the light (only a couple of seconds not too long) and then develop, stop it and fix the image to the paper.