Tuesday

May I interest you with three unrelated photographs that I shot today. 





Playing Around

Updates, updates.

I have now returned to my uni studies and am currently in the middle of a small warm-up project which will be followed by a bigger and more demanding community art assignment in a couple of weeks, of which I am absolutely thrilled about. As for my two summer children that I tried to develop during the holiday - well, neither quite got there in the end. The mythology project is stuck at me having that one single image printed on canvas, still waiting to be treated with paint. The other one, 'Hyperventilation' as I call it, met the exact faith that I anticipated: lack of usable material. However, I got really encouraging and positive feedback on that one so it may well be that after Christmas I go back to it.
Nothing new to show on that front then. Well, I do have a video but since it is such a compromise and feels completely unfinished, I'd rather not publish it in its current form.

But what is this 'small warm-up project' I am talking about?

The assignment is called MAKE, which in all its simplicity is pretty descriptive for the task given to us was merely to gather any kind of picture material and make something out of it. Vague, I know, but extremely liberating at that, and seems like the perfect kick-start for the year 2 of university.

I have decided to make the most of the free and unbinding spirit of the assignment and thus kept from perfecting a concept. Actually, I'm not gonna lie - I don't have any concept whatsoever, not a firm one anyway. Then again, my tutor did give her blessing for this total unpreparedness and told me to just follow my instincts.

For some reason I instantly got this idea of gathering classical storybooks from the numerous charity shops that we have here in Newport, and using their imagery to create something - a collage, a montage at this stage it seems. As a passionate reader of fairy tales, destroying books has been a -- new experience, but I keep telling myself that it's okay because my real, true favourite treasures are safely back in Finland and I would never, ever, ever touch them with anything sharp. The things I do for art.

Forgive me Lord for I have sinned.
In addition to the colourful and in all respects typical fairy tale illustrations I have a couple of old portrait photographs that I found from a car boot sale, and a brilliantly disturbing book called The World of Small Ads which is a collection of, surprisingly enough, small ads from the 1880's US covering all the possible areas of advertisement from muscle pills to sexual services, magic tricks and health products. Those ads though, are so totally not from this age: 'politically correct' didn't seem to be trendy back then. Or how do you feel about the weight loss pill ad below?

So basically, I have these contradictory image sources that intend to bring together in a surrealist explosion of insanity.
Or something.
I don't know and I am rejoicing of every single moment of this being allowed no to know.

And now, may I interest you to some of the fruits of my spending hours in a studio.