Looking back at my work in foundation there seems to be a recurring theme. All my work appeared to go back to a type of personal and physical deterioration. A breaking down of the body somehow and my apparent dissatisfaction with this process.
Starting from my early clay work, a Grayson Perry style pot based the change from a child to an adult. Feeling slightly disgruntled at the fact I felt a tad overwhelmed with the idea of university when I still felt like a child. The pot features nursery rhymes from my childhood and sketched images of photographs including extreme opposites of teddy bears, high heels and vodka bottles. Perhaps its my way of saying I felt children are growing up too fast, throwing away their childhoods too soon, a loss of innocence. Anyway for a first attempt I was chuffed!
The next installation piece was a series of clay casts of a Barbie doll I had made from a plaster mould (originally it had been a resin cast of a ken doll in pink but this was for my own amusement!). The piece was about body image, how were are all obsessed by how we look in comparison to everyone else and seek to make ourselves the same as each other. The Barbie doll appeared to be the perfect representation of this as it matched up to the ever-impossible ideas of the perfect unattainable body. This I then went on to experiment with the glazes and the presentation of the clay. It was a really interesting process and really enjoyed it! Using the same process I screen printed ceramic transfers of a series of statements commonly used by women in society linked to their body issues. Coat hangers came in handy for this work as it was easy to hang five slightly distorted versions of the female image onto a kind of clothes rail, or as others have commented, meat hooks. Each figure has an exaggerated feature, each a personal issue to a majority of women.
Glass was a possibility at my college and I was extremely keen to have a go. With the site specific theme my chosen space at Stanmore Orthopedic hospital I studied closely images of bone cells and really wanted to create a fragile, glass sculpture as this I felt highlighted the delicate nature of the breakdown I felt people who visited this hospital went through. I wanted it to hang from the hospitals trees on the outside grounds, like a wind chime almost, reflecting the natural light of the sun. They all connected a group of people all in the same position, representation of life. Created by carving the unusual shapes out of plaster and using crushed pieces of recycled glass in various random colours, which I connected through a swirl of steel wire.
Lastly for my FMP I wanted to create something personally linked to my experiences at the time, my Grandmother who has been linked to all my art work and a major influence on my life so far! I really enjoyed the textures and surfaces it created and really wanted to see the potential for it as a surface and sculptural qualities as final outcome. Conceptually I needed to express my complete loss of faith in humanity at the time. Observing treated of the elderly really angered me at the time; a complete loss of identity and respect was being highlighted from hospital staff and everyone around me at the time of my Grandmothers visit to a hospital. This at times left me totally at a loss. So this is what I based my work on. I wanted to use a personally emotionally provoking object, my Grandmothers ice skate, as she uses to be semi-pro in her youth and cast this in a block of plaster by dipping it in alginate. This slowly went through positive and negative stages, a series of six all together. Slowly deteriorating through time by a layering process of wood varnishes, paint and sand paper. They were almost 3D paintings.
