Over the weekend I spent much of my time planning. Anyone that know me will tell you how I feel the need to exercise control of the unknown. I struggle a lot with freeing my mind of structure and organisation which can certainly pose as a difficulty when trying to create work without an outcome in mind. Frankly, I find the whole blank canvas concept overwhelming and find myself relying on lists, diagrams and various squiggles that depict a distinct desperation for control. Rather than spending the weekend working directly into my sketchbooks this weekend has been devoted to careful placement of attractive post-it notes structuring the whole of my sketchbooks so that they flow in a way that I need them too. What I find strange is that I am forever jotting things down or quickly sketching out ideas, yet when it comes to my sketchbook I struggle at making a mark if it has not yet been reconsidered. Tomorrow I plan on spending my time editing all of my images and going through ensuring I have all the images I need to progress to the next section of my planned timeline, which of course has had much time spent ensuring everything has a timescale.
Today I have been busy setting up my artists portfolio online. I intend on creating a hard copy of my portfolio but I have always thought that an online blog serves to be the most functional.
An online portfolio increasingly more accessible as it enables an artist to share their work with a multitude of people quickly an easily. Future employers and/or commissioners are able to access the internet to view a portfolio upon recommendation without having to spend unnecessary time. Good accessibility and time saving may mean the different between a portfolio being viewed or not.
Further more I believe this cost effective method of self promotion increase the appearance of professionalism and can result in a higher quality experience for the viewer in contrast to a hard copy portfolio.
I have decided to use Wix Website Editor to create my website as the templates provided were easy to navigate around and work from. I enjoyed experimenting with different aspects of the program had to offer and have included interactive elements to my site which I think furthers its aesthetic appeal.
I have chosen a house style which I consider to be professional yet sleek, although there were many options to make the site pretty and colourful I think that the style I have chosen portrays a higher standard, thus reflecting my professionalism and increasing my employability.
I have ensured the font and sizing is the same throughout the site and kept the layout of my site simple and easy to navigate around.
Although my layout is simple I have opted for a fun, modern approach- for example the images of my work appear in a diamond shape which when clicked will enlarge to provide the whole image alongside details.
Another positive aspect to an online portfolio is if I chose to developed he site in the future I am able to add a function which allows viewers to purchase artwork online. This could be helpful in my future artistic career.
I am able to design the portfolio for both computer and devices such as iPhone and iPad again increasing the accessibility of my portfolio. I have still got to upload the images of my work and have not published the site yet as the template images are in place of my work but the video included gives an example of what the site will look like when completed. At the moment the site does not have a unique domain name, this is something that I am able to change in the future if I desire however at the moment I am happy the way it is.
Writing my artists statement is something that I have been thinking about doing for a while. Previous statements have written consist of several descriptive lines that vaguely sum up what I am as an artist. Previous statements explain what medium I’m using and the title of my area of study with little more besides a description on technique.
I wanted this statement to be different. As the final statement I will write during my university career I wanted my statement to be more informative. I wanted it to capture my viewer and provide them with an understanding of my work and my intentions as well as the methodology. It may be a first draft upon which I build but here is my current artists statement:
My work serves as a platform of exploration, which enables me to decipher my inner most emotions. During the final chapter of my university career the theory of human emotion has become a focal point from which my work matures. The centralisation of this idea has initiated a compulsive desire to understand how an emotion is experienced. My thoughts have pivoted from the theory of emotion being highly perceptual.
The question that I have been contemplating is ‘how does one know for certain that an individual’s experience of an emotion is the same?’ We don’t. After all, we each experience things in a different way due to our cultural differences, our environmental differences and so on, thus meaning that what one individual believes to be a feeling of excitement may be another individuals understanding of surprise. So what if emotions existed in a physical state? Surely that would make it easier for our feelings to be transferable. If we could see what an emotion really looked like then maybe, just maybe we would have a better understanding of it.
It is important to me for my work to be meaningful. It is as much about the idea that is being explored as it is about the aesthetical outcome, arguably perhaps even more so. The concept of human emotions is relevant to me as it is an idea that causes much debate. Every individual experiences emotion throughout their journey of life and being able to understand each unique experience intrigues me. The journey through myself as an artist has been for me the most fundamental journey of my time at University Campus Suffolk as is has seen a conflicting relationship that could have been written by Shakespeare himself. The loving/loathing relationship I experience with my practise has driven me to develop my experimentation and research into the understanding of emotions. My journey as an artist has also resulted in the realisation that my body of work is most successful when consisting of mixed media and beng multi-dimensional in its being rather than focused on a singular medium and/or technical ability.
Audience perception is important to the success of my work as it helps prove that emotion is highly perceptual. In my previous studies I have found audience participation to be a source of inspiration to my work, as I believe it to be most successful when the viewer is integrated within the concept as it enables them to share my personal preoccupation with the idea. I have studied audience participation for previous work and installations such as rAndom Internationals Rain Room serves as a wonderful source of inspiration when considering the captivating effect that I want my work to evoke.
I booked Long Street studio yesterday and I am so pleased with the outcome! Having used the studio last week I knew I wanted to frame my subject slightly differently and I also realised why I was not overly pleased with my lighting- I forgot radio triggers- Oopps!
Anyway I was off to a good start, my model felt more comfortable and rehearsed with the expressions she would be pulling and I also found that taking photos during conversations we were having about different memories/scenarios enabled me to capture a more realistic expression.
This time I used a Nikon D3100 to take the images however as I shoot in RAW I had to convert all the files to JPEG to be able to use them on Facebook and this blog.
I really want to print out some of my favourite images and ask people to decide which emotion they feel it portrays.
During the shoot we watched this video to help us think more about different expressions :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW0PaKOXxQI
As you can see I had to play around with lighting again but I’m really happy with the over all effect.
I also asked my model to turn around and face away from the camera as this would make for a different feel to the images. It is easier to guess the emotion if the model when the viewer can see the facial expression paired alongside the body language, however when the facial expression is concealed it makes it a lot harder to know how the subject is feeling. This is the beginning of the idea I am exploring- how do you know what emotion an individual is experiencing? Sure we can guess by their facial expressions and the way their bey is posed however theorists suggest that there are only four different muscle expressions that our face is able to pull, the rest is only achieved by cultural beliefs. .
Today was a really productive day in Long Street Photography studio! After looking at Plutchik’s ‘Wheel of Emotions’ I decided I wanted to experiment with my own wheel of emotions through the exploration of facial expressions.
I had the idea of taking different photographs of different facial expressions and experiment with layering the images to emphasise the different muscles the face uses. My friend Jordan agreed to model for me and we both quickly realised how difficult it is to pose for different expressions and saw the similarities in many of the emotions we explored.
I then decided that once I have edited all the images I want to display them and ask people to guess which emotion we was hoping to portray. I watched a video from TED speaker Micheal Stevens a while ago that discussed the idea of how there is no way of knowing whether two people really see colours in the same way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evQsOFQju08 which really helped provide stimulus to my current question: How do we know people experience, understand and interpret emotions in the same way?
Im hoping that this experimentation will help me explore this idea further within my work and I have booked the studio for next week to continue my experimentation.
As you can see from the attached images I had to play around with the set up and lighting a fair bit as the soft lighting that I chose to use meant that the balance was washing out Jordan’s face and jumper.
