Self as a practitioner.

RESEARCH PROJECT PRESENTATIONS; 'SELF AS ARTIST / PRACTITIONER'

I am defiantly more a stills artist than a moving image maker, at least up until now. This might just be because of the fact that I haven't really done much video work and I'm still a little intimidated by the prospect of it! I do enjoy editing however. But for now I'm leaning more towards the photography side.

I do find it quite hard to get myself motivated, and I need a lot of inspiration to get started on a project, I need to find something that I'm really interested in before I can start to delve into my work; Which means I spend a lot of time in the library researching and browsing through journals and books, to constantly inspire me and get as much research as I possibly can.

As for what I like to photograph, I do like to capture portraits of people and bring out elements of their personalities, because I feel that one photograph as a portrait isn't really enough as a representation of the person, you cannot see everything about one person from one photograph. There are loads of different aspects to any one person and I like to show off the different elements of who someone is and what they have to offer. I also like to do this with my own self portraits, which I tend to take a lot of. Here's an example of one;

As I mentioned in a previous post, I prefer a more ambiguous approach rather than direct to photography as well as video. I like to leave an element of mystery in my work and have the viewer draw their own conclusions. Below is an example of part of a series I created on personality disorders, the subject for this image being schizophrenia;

A close friend of mine was suffering from this disorder at the time I created this image, and I wanted to express this experience she was going though; her loss of identity being the predominant aspect of it, confusion, delirium, anxiety, fear, generally a horrible thing to have to go though. I wanted to all bring these elements across in the image, but not be so bold about it. I chose the colours and the scratches to give it a grim, haunting feeling; the Suffocation with this illness that was taking over her at the time.

Colourwise I prefer more neutral colours that blend and work well together, opposed to bright, Martin Parr-like 'in your face colours', which frankly hurt my eyes and make my head hurt.

Some photographers I adore because of this ambiguity are Francessca Woodman, even weirder stuff really interests me like Hans Bellmer. I love Cindy Sherman becasue of the different characters she portrays, again different aspects of her personality, alter ego's or even people she might like to be ? This really interest me.

--------------------------

For my individual transitional spaces theme, I have decided I'd like to study the transition of being a child growing into adulthood. The emotions we go through, the realizations, What we learn, how we discover different parts of our personalities as we develop and grow into the people we are, [even if we don't like certain parts of who we are].

I was also considering using different experiences , memories maybe even significant dreams and re-enacting them.

I want to do all these as self portraits however.

I could even interview people about different parts of their own expeireicens growing up, memories from childhood etc, and reenacting them and possibly using voiceovers from the interview?

For this I'd need to really carefully consider what questions I could ask and how to ask them as to get the answers I want, especially if I don't really know the people I'd be interviewing !

These are just a few ideas for now though that I'm just getting down onto here before i forget them.