Artist & Cultural Exploration

Now I am going to research various artist and cultural/socially trends of representation.  First I shall investigate the artist and what aspects of their works I want to steal or borrow.

The first artist I’m investigating is Charles Avery. He is a Scottish artist born in the year 1973 and he work is focused around an imagined civilisations that inhabit a fictitious island. He works on constructing various people, customs, rituals, wilderness and societies through the use of drawings, sculptures, text, installations and moving imagines. These are some of his works.

Untitled (Pool, Onomatopeia Zoo)

2016

Pencil, acrylic, gouache, watercolour and ink on paper

214.5 x 149.3 x 7.5 cm

Untitled (It means It Means, Beuys, Square Gasjet)

2014

Pencil, ink, acrylic and gouache on paper

235 x 225 cm

Progressionist

2014

White Painted bronze and card

50 x 30 x 35 cm

What I’m finding myself drawn towards with this artist isn’t necessarily connected with the first part of this project or the thought process behind the work but this coming together of various elements to give the impression of a narrative. I was thinking that I could take those portraits, maybe they could even turn into full body shots and they would soon come to dominate a landscape. This could extend into the way characters interact with one another. Depending on the various emotional responses would determine how they are positioned against one another. This would then become a landscape of self-portraits through the eyes of the other.  Actually on second thought I was thinking if time is available I would be able to extended on the portraits once completed.  By this I mean, I would take each character a step further and give them bodies and possibly various naratives behind them which correlate to the initial rules I created which help guide said portraits and possibly even modify how and what they are.  It would become a self-reflection process that is initiated by response from others in regard to my personality and character or their interpretations and conclusions of the behaviours I’ve presented before them and the symbols others speak when I am not in their presence.

The next artist which I am going to inspect and currently completely unaware of the contributions this reviewing process will add to my work, goes by the name of Tehching Hsieh.  He is an Taiwan born performanced based artist who’s works extended over relatively long periods of recorded time.  Many of his works spand over a year in which a specific ritual or set of rules are placed onto the artist by himself.  He has completed five of these year long projects.  One of them, which I find to be the most interesting, was where he wasn’t able to enter an enclosed enviroment and spent the year outside.  This included buildings, cars, trains, trams and even caves.   The evidence was a collection of maps marking out his route over the course of a day and the accumulations of maps was spread across the gallery wall for the exhibition.  Below is a statement from another work of his.  This is typically how he would set out each one.

One Year Perfomance 1978 – 1979

What I am finding most interesting about this artist and his approach to creating works is how it doesn’t nesecarrily need to end up with a traditional work.  The artwork could manifest into documentation of the process being followed.  I think that is possibly something I could bring to my art but I still have this intense urge to draw and paint.  But maybe I could take his strict nature in sticking with these rules and apply it to my process.  Where the process I create for each in response to each answer given could be rather particular.  Rather than it being losely one thing it would have to be very specific.  An example of this could be the colours I use depending on the results. For the emotion of anger I could go with social cue and use various tones of red and blacks but since they are split into two different categories each red that is used would be cool if they disagree or warm if they agree.  Possibly something along the lines of that.  We will see where this takes us.