I have found this project so far a lot harder to solidify a concept for than I did with my final year undergraduate project. I'm feeling a lot further behind in that sense, but I know for the most part that it's okay to not be at the same level of 'completeness' now that I was this time last year as I am now on a part-time course, so the practical project side of my qualification is done in twice the amount of time. Last (academic) year I was working on a project about my Dad and his relationship with the landscape, something that I had thought very deeply about before even landing on that as a theme for my work. Whereas this year my starting point was just wanting to explore my own inexplicable pull to wanting to create from and with the landscape.
As was discussed in my last project, being brought up by my dad was a major factor in my own love of all things natural, but it goes deeper than that. I feel myself incredibly connected to the landscape in such a way that my love for it is integral to the 'essence' of me. That's why I am attempting to create a self-portrait with the landscape. A self-portrait lacking a visual likeness of the 'self' and focusing much more on an emotional and metaphorical one. I wish to discuss through representational visuals what and who I am, the way I journey through the landscape and what are the interactions I have during these journeys, what my relationship with the landscape entails, and to a more specific degree how I have come to fall so very in love with the natural Wales.
As this is a self-portrait, I wish to include parts of myself that may not be immediately obvious to the average onlooker. I believe my draw to film photography over digital has a lot to do with the fact I was doing an astrophysics degree before switching over to art. From a very young age I was invested in science, and film photography sates that hunger within the darkroom and the optical workings of a camera. That is also why pinhole photography has been such a pull for this specific project. A pinhole lens was one of the earliest form of lenses I had learnt about in a physics class, and getting to the point where I am creating my own and using formulas and mathematics to do so is something I am enjoying to no end.
The aesthetics of these pinhole images is important to my concept as well for a variety of reasons. The blurred and somewhat obscured nature of these images fits in well with how I picture and remember things. I am not sure how common it is, as you can never truly 'get inside someone's head', but whenever I picture things or try to remember, I can never 'see' a clear image. It is always more of a feeling or an impression of what I am thinking of and imagining, at the very most a mass of shapes and tones much like these pinhole images I have been capturing. This isn't to say that I cant remember or think up details, more that I just don't 'see' them like how others apparently can. As much as I love the visuals of the landscapes I walk through, once I am away from them I cannot picture in my 'mind's eye' what they looked like, but I can feel them in my chest, and I can recall the physical sensations I experienced in them incredibly well. My remembering is far more physical than it is visual and I believe the aesthetics of the pinhole lenses I am using are much more apt to spark a physical sensation in the viewers of my work than an image taken with an incredibly sharp lens could for this specific project.
These very same aesthetic aspects of the pinhole tie in to my own experience of anxiety and depression. Both of these mental health issues that I suffer from can cause periods of dissociation where I can feel disconnected from thoughts, feelings, memories, and surroundings. During these periods of disconnect visuals can appear out of focus, details hard to locate and lock on to, and physical feelings can become weakened and fuzzy. I feel the visuals of the pinhole images I've been taking can relate to these feelings of distance that I and many other experience. At the end of it all, I want my work to conjure up physical feelings and emotional responses in my viewers, and I feel including images such as these pinholes is an incredible way to do this as the visuals of the images can relate to so many aspects of the 'self-portrait' I am creating. I don't want to explicitly state the reasons behind the visuals at the point of viewing, I want the viewer to take from it their own interpretation whatever it may be. Even if the individual has not experienced what are my reasons for choosing a pinhole (or has not experienced them in the same way), I still believe a pinhole image is something that will inspire the viewer to look more intently at my work, searching through it for details whilst they come to their own conclusions on what the choice of lens means.
There are other aspects to this project that have very deliberate choices behind them. I am printing my images onto sections of OS maps using a variety of processes including cyanotypes, Van Dyke brown prints, and using liquid emulsion. The photosensitive emulsion is the only one of those processes I so far haven't tried, and until this project started I was not even aware of its existence so it is an incredibly exciting thing to be testing out. The use of the maps and the photographic paper is just further connecting my images to the landscape, especially when the images themselves are not as clear as an image taken with a regular glass lens would be. I've always enjoyed looking at maps, and thanks to my dad I was taught how to read and navigate them from a young age. Not only is it the function of the maps I enjoy however, I believe they are works of art in and of themselves. The years of recording and the sheer amount of time and effort that goes in to creating one of these OS maps is incredible and beyond that, the way the contour lines and the different lines and colours for roads or pathways intersect is something I could get lost in forever (which is funny considering maps help you not get lost).
As mentioned in a previous post, I am looking to experiment with layers of paint on top of the prints. I'm considering using a range of paints from the darker blacks, to perhaps a more reflective chrome, or even a very small splash of a bright colour. I wouldn't want to overwhelm the images, especially as they will be in black and white, but I would like to use this layering to reveal through obscuring. Tying this back into the self-portrait theme, the reasoning behind this would be because there are parts of my life that I keep hidden from others intentionally or not, revealing different parts to different people all dependent on the relationship we he have, but also that there are parts of my past that are even hidden from myself. I went through a lot of very stressful and damaging experiences involving my mother, and there are so many aspects to that time that I have no recollection of. A lot of this aspect of the visualisation of my concept needs to be fleshed out, and its inclusion will all depend on numerous tests and experimentations with different paints and application methods, but it is something I am excited to try out.
Overall, this project is still in early days and there are a few more avenues I wish to explore than what I've spoken about here. With all that said and done, I am very excited to be taking on this project and experimenting with methods of image taking and printing that I haven't experienced before. The goal of creating a self-portrait without a visual likeness of my physical being is something I find so incredibly intriguing, so much so that it is my focus for my art history research essay. I believe it can be done, and that I will do it, and I want to be an example of a successful self portrait outside of the traditional definition of one. Hopefully my work, both physical art and academic writing, can help spark a reexamining of this definition in the future,
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