Since I decided I wanted to create my own dressing room in the studio space I thought I need to look at other artists that bring their own personal items into the gallery, so I decided to look at British artist Tracey Emin and her piece “my bed”. Which really reveals her real life, the piece is so personal to her and that makes the audience relates to it better. This is what I want to create in my one piece.
Tracey Emin
My Bed
1998
Mattress, linens, pillows, objects
79 x 211 x 234 cm
A consummate storyteller, Tracey Emin engages the viewer with her candid exploration of universal emotions. Well-known for her confessional art, Tracey Emin reveals intimate details from her life to engage the viewer with her expressions of universal emotions. Her ability to integrate her work and personal life enables Emin to establish an intimacy with the viewer.
Tracey shows us her own bed, in all its embarrassing glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown. By presenting her bed as art, Tracey Emin shares her most personal space, revealing she is insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world. http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists
I have recently been thinking that I would like to make a small photo book to show on the night of the degree show so that the audience can see my previous work so they can connect all my pieces together. I wanted to create just a small book something I could lay onto the dressing table and people would look at.
So I have begun to create my photo book on blurb, I wanted it just simple something that would just show off my previous work. Here are some of the pages I have created on blurb and a couple of my title pages.
Over the past few weeks I have been really thinking hard about what I am defiantly going to do for my degree show. I have wanted from the begging to use a projector in my work, either a performance piece in which I would have a projection of me removing my makeup shinned onto my face which would be bare. The other idea was to play a video projection onto the wall which would be me, one half with makeup and one half without looking at each other.
However due to lack of space and dark rooms, it was not possible for me to do my projection pieces, so I had to have a little rethink of what I was going to do. I looked over the space I had been given and thought about what I was going to do. I still want to display a full size image of me looking at myself (in a reflective manner) one side I will be nature and in plain clothes and the other half I will be in full makeup and more dressed up. I will have this printed to about 6ft high 2 and half ft wide, so it is taller than I actually am so it is more eye catching.
The next part I want to create is a video piece as I have always wanted to make some kind of video piece for my degree project. What I have decided to do is play a tv with a video of me adding and removing my makeup. However I want to construct the tv into something that looks like a mirror so as if it is a mirror is what the audience is looking at not just a tv on a wall. I have thought about what makes something look more like a mirror and I automatically come up with lights round it, like a dressing room from the movies or the theatres.
So from that I thought to make this piece much more personal and about me, the next step to make this piece come alive would be to reconstruct my own dressing room at home, I will set up how my dressing room is at home. This makes the piece more personal and I feel really brings together everything I want to say thought my piece.I will decorate the space with my own furniture and mirror and clothes I have hanging up in my room, also I want to stick round the edge of the tv mirror images of woman I have always wanted to look like and how I inspired to look like. This for me is so personal and I am really putting all my personal thoughts and feelings into the piece.
I have been discussing with my lecturers about what I plan to do in my degree show. I have come up with an idea which I may or may not use for my final degree piece. I really want to put across to the audience my emotions and how I feel about myself and my looks. This is something really personal to me and I want that to come across. I am really trying to break down the barrier that I put up on a daily bias. So it is important to put myself out of my comfort zone and show to people that this is a really issue I have every day and I hope that other women will relate to my feelings and thoughts. I am self-reflecting in the videos and I am being the male gaze upon myself I and judging myself as an object. I am trying to make myself pleasing to my own eye so I feel more comfortable in myself and that is what I want to show in my work.
What I plan to do is make two videos one of me removing my makeup and the other one of me putting on my makeup. I will play the two videos separate and play them from two different projects. I will also put the videos on a loop and may also reverse part of them so at some point in the video there will be a point where I will look the same in both videos. Both images at one point will be of me pausing and looking at myself from both sides without my makeup on. I haven’t decided yet if I should make the projections life size or bigger so it adds more of an impact to the audience or would they relate more if I was life size. I plan the video to be full size me from head to toe; I will be wearing either plan underwear or some pale simple clothes. I haven’t decided if I will use the edge of the wall or not, from playing around with the projector I don’t think I really like using the edge of the wall or not, I am also not sure yet if that works.
Projection
After working with the images and over lapping those to create this double layer look. This idea has then leaded me on to wanting to work again with video but maybe playing the video so I am facing myself. The videos will be played in sync one video will be of me removing my makeup and one will be of me taking it off I want to play them in a loop or even play them backwards so eventually the two videos will be at the same point which will be me without my makeup on. The videos will be two full body videos of me, and I will use a projector to make them life size. After looking back at my dissertation I knew how I wanted to present my work to the audience.
In the studio’s today I got hold of a projector and played around with some ideas that I had thought about to see if they would work or not and how they would look. I decided to use the dark space to see how the atmosphere would be like when someone walked into the room. I played my video to see how that would look and then I projected some images to see how they looked on a big screen. I also played with where the projector was so I could make a divide using the walls so it makes it look as if I am looking at myself.
I think it worked well, I really like the fact that it was bigger than real life it made the piece seem more powerful and I liked how over powering it was. I think if I did use this idea for my final degree that I would have to use two projectors so I didn’t get this slope in the images. The room being black was also powerful you couldn’t work out where in the room you where and how far away you was from the Image. It was hard to take a clear image in the room but I took some to see and reflect on how it looked and how it would work.
