Week 13

Week 13

26^th October – 30^th October

This week I have been doing looking back at the grid of faces I did a few weeks ago, I have developed it into a drawing following my tutorial from last week. I initially didn’t think it would work but once I started the drawing started coming together really nice. It has this vacant presence to it. I drew all the girls in my grid but I left their faces out, as I wanted faceless faces.  I also brought in the time restrain again as it has been working for me. I gave myself five minutes to get, as much of the grid drawn out continuously as I want it all in one smooth line. I took pictures of each stage and there is a really nice progression and I can definitely see some development coming from the piece.

I have also been preparing for the two-tutor crit this week making sure I have enough development work to inspire my direction in the Practice unit. I have printed some zoomed in segments of the coloured face drawings and put them on acetate as I think they would work well as light instillations for interiors. I have an overhead projector to show them as examples. Light has been a very key factor within this project so far, by turning these drawings into lighting instillations for interiors we are giving these nameless faceless people a chance to illuminate a room as they are warm and colourful and representative of people who were long lost and now they are filling a room for families and friend’s.  I could also incorporate fabric with a drape to give it texture and then project onto that for movement.

Week 12

Week 12

19^th October – 23^rd October

This week I have been focusing on drawing and producing work, I had an idea of drawing my face for one minute every five minutes for an hour as this will push me out of my comfort zone. Having to draw a face in a minute is challenging, I wanted to see if I could still recognise myself in any of the drawings after the hour was up. The results were quite dull as I drew in pencil and the drawings all blended together.  The exercise is pretty good at generating work and especially for me as I get slowed down on details so having to get the whole face down in a minute was making my draw quickly. I then tried this exercise again but with colour and different thickness of pens. This time I reflected on my pencil drawing and extended my time limit to two minutes. This allowed me to get down twenty different expressions on the one sheet and I really like the outcome of this piece. Some of the drawings were recognisable and some were very distorted and unrecognizable. It was an interesting idea that my face over and over again is then nothing but a mess of lines, although with the colour it added depth and separated the faces out successfully. I could have definitely developed that drawing into a print pattern and could use other people as inspiration in the series. 

Week 11

Week 11

12^th October – 16^th October

This week I have been focusing on the other people in my studio and not just myself. I wanted to try and recreate the faceless faces that I saw when in Auschwitz, by collecting ID cards from the girls and photo copying them.  I then created a wall of faces in my sketchbook, some are repeated and some not but the idea I am playing with is how long until a face is just a face and you stop looking at individuals and look at a mass of faces and can’t tell if there is the same one four times because they

all blur together. That is a loss of identity. I also found an artist who works in a similar way to what I was trying to do. His work is incredible he is trying to give these victims pieces of their identity back, giving them a flicker of life again. I like his work because its all personal to him and he uses images he procured through the Holocaust archives, he brings these people back into the eye of the public. As I said before he gives them their identities back they are people not prisoners of Auschwitz. Boltanski uses these small lights like candles to flicker life back into their long forgotten faces.  What I am doing is closely related to this, as I want to create a wall of faces like he has done, he uses scale very cleverly to get the enormity of his work across.

Week 10

Week 10

5^th October – 9^th October

Another thing I found fascinating is how the prisoners were stripped of their names, families and homes but they were given one identifying marker back. A number was tattooed onto them like cattle, this I found really interesting as I also had a number but in a completely different context. My student number is a big part of my university life and I wanted to try and see how I could try and change my situation to match that of a prisoner but not in a prison paradigm. I experimented with writing the number on my arm as an identifying feature, but it kept rubbing off. I then thought back to my dismantled self-portraits and wanted to try and make up one of my lost features with this number so even thought they were not actually there the number would be a representation of my once identifying feature, which now means nothing, but the repeated number has a link to my identity. I thought the glasses came out very well actually they were eerie and captured what I wanted them too. I could imagine doing them in a much larger scale and developing that idea further. Using metals for the numbers and having them as like sculptures hanging in a gallery space. I could recreate different features all out of the one key number and together they would

create and identity of a person, who could not be made whole without each piece fitting together.

Number no name

My main focus for this week is to bring a selection of my drawings in and photo copy them. I tried out numerous ideas. I want to work into them more and see how far I could take my ideas.
Could I begin to use colour to experiment with how personality comes through? If all my physical attributes are stripped from me, what else do I have left?
I started by analysing myself and my identifying features, this allowed me to see what I identified with the most and then take it away.

Week 9

Week 9

28^th September – 2^nd October

This week I was following on from my summer work and trying to develop a few of my ideas for this project. I brought my drawings into the studio so I could photo copy and manipulate them. I want to see how much I have to do to these drawings that I no longer recognise myself in them. This is what I was trying to investigate this week. I removed all the identifying features I associate myself most with, the two main ones being my glasses and my hair. If I was in Auschwitz I would have been able to keep neither and there would be nothing recognizably me left. It did experiment with colour papers I had dyed, as I wanted to try and make my personality shine through like a woman I saw in Auschwitz smiling in her picture. No family no hope of survival and living in a death camp but still smiling in her picture, letting her personality shine through. Something that people can never take away from you, your personality and spirit. I didn’t like the segmented drawings with the colour but I do like the drawings themselves I’m sure I can develop them further.  This idea of identity is something I can definitely explore in a range of media and materials