And suddenly it's Spring

I just had to check when was the last time updated this blog, and dearie me that was ages ago!
So, a lot has happened since the beginning of the semester.

First and foremost, I finished my dissertation right on time! And I have to say that I am quite pleased with the outcome. Or at least I was the day I handed it in. But since we are getting the grades sometime in summer, there's no point in wondering whether I could have done something better or not. All in all, I am happy for finishing in time and ending up with a paper to be proud of.

After emerging out of the writing bubble that I'd been inhabiting for the past months I took some downtime and went to London to visit a friend and take a breather from the academic life - and post-dissertation partying.

Another milestone in my artist career was opening my first solo show a week ago in Finland. Even though the exhibition is a rather modest one it is still my first, and on top of that, two of my bodies of work are going to be on display for two weeks. Any kind of visibility is a huge plus for an undergraduate such as myself. Furthermore, there are three more upcoming exhibitions before my official graduation - including the graduate show itself. These are all very small venues but just getting my work out there for free is extremely beneficial regarding my life post-university.

A few shots from my exhibition in Helsinki. The crazy balloons at the background weren't my aesthetic choice by the way...

Now I'm focusing on my current project, and checking out internships and such every now and then. Filming on HDV-tapes is a completely new technical challenge, and I'm also learning about working with audio, and a lot of other techie stuff that I know very little of. There is a lot of work to be done before the semester is over, so I'd better get back to it right now.

Research Diary: Assessment DONE!

So, I had quite an intense weekend finishing off my work for the first module in my last year of BA, and finally, at 5:30am on Monday it was done. A submission deadline was at noon so I only got a few hours of sleep but fortunately I was merely required to show up on time with my CD including a PowerPoint presentation, an artist statement and still images from my video piece. After handing my work in, I felt a great sense of triumph as the past weeks have been incredibly taxing emotionally, and thus making concentrating on my studies nearly impossible. And yet, I did it!

I had to give my presentation on Tuesday, which was good because I didn't have any extra time to stress about it, unlike some people who have to wait for theirs until Friday this week.

We are going to get proper feedback sometime next week, but the instant reactions of my two tutors were surprisingly positive, in fact, when I was finished one of them said, and I quote: "Thank you Anni, that was impressive", (I got flustered at this point) and also "You're definitely gonna be an artist" (even more flustered, and beaming). So I guess I did good.

But now, I'll share some parts of my presentation just because it was impressive.

First of all, I've named my project 'A Prisoner', after Emily Brontë's poem 'The Prisoner. A Fragment, and particularly the following passages.

"-- My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels
Its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour found;
Measuring the gulph it stoops and dares the final bound!

Oh, dreadful is the check - intense the agony
When the ear begins to hear and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again,
The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain!"

I'll give you the most central part of my artist statement: the one in which I outline what my work is about.

Now, the piece itself is, as I said, video. A very unfinished, in progress video. But I can show some stills and try to explain where it's going through the various stages that I went through to get to the present, as well as my plans for the next module.
Before that, let's revise my historical source material - the images of hysterical patients of a Parisian hospital in the late 19th century, when photography was sporting the status of accurately representing the real and the true - if you could see it, then it must be a fact.

By taking countless photographs of mental patients, often hypnotized and/or bound up, in order to be more easily controlled, the head neurologist, Charcot, thought he could prove his theories on hysteria, which obviously seems very wrong today. I'm interested in the, almost obsessive need to pin down this disease or condition affecting mainly women of the turn-of-the-century Europe and America. How these physical confines sort of reflect on the social confines in which women had to try to lead liveable lives whilst their husbands, fathers and physicians were wrecking their brains over why their women seemed unhappy - and sometimes insane.

Like you've shackled someone to a wall, and then you wonder why they don't take a walk as if the chains didn't exist.

Now we come to my experiments in studio.

I started by recreating the series from the original material just see what would happen and know how it would feel to perform those movements. I felt like that wasn't going anywhere so I started moving in the studio more freely, always basing my movement on the source but not performing it in the correct order. I had my camera on self-timer so that I could still work alone, and in about five or six photoshoots I produced some 900+ individual images. For a long while I felt really precious about those images as their aesthetics intrigue me and draw me in, but I wasn't quite happy with just the pretty surface because it didn't actually bring across anything I wanted to talk about.
Moving on to video, I still stuck with the stills, assembling a film where all of the 900+ images were flashed rapidly one after the other. And for a while, I was captivated by the effect.

But then, even that felt somewhat - bland. So I started working with moving image.

These are stills from my current, short video piece and they don't really give any sort of a clue of that the film actually looks like. I mean, yes, that's how it looks like but you don't get the sound, the varying pace, the flickering or the movement quality. It is quite eerie and bizarre and compulsive - and it is going to be even more so once I have more footage, better sound and more time to edit.

Not only do I have to create some additional raw material, but also, I'm now thinking towards two separate screens that would bring more attention to the the confinement of the body within the frame, and how it can resist this confinement through movement. I want the final outcome, whatever it may be, to be an intense experience for the viewer.

And finally, let's have the last paragraphs of my artist statement that perhaps bring a bit more light to my intentions. Or merely confuse you - I don't know.

Now, onto dissertation!

Research Diary: 39 hours to the first deadline

Indeed, I am still here, alive and kicking, working on assessments.
The silence here has been due to some personal issues that kept me off uni work for about a month or so. After a lovely Christmas holiday with my family and friends has given me a new boost of energy, which I am currently using to get together a presentation for Monday noon when the hand-in for my artistic project is.

Regardless of the drawback in December I feel fairly confident about all of the components of my projects, and thus, without further ado, I will return to scraping together an example video piece, a written artist statement and a power point presentation.

I more profound catch up shall (hopefully) follow sometime next week.

Research Diary: Why I wish I hadn't watched that film

Sometimes it is incredibly refreshing to abandon the pile of books and notes that I mostly use for writing and planning my projects, and watch a film of a relevant topic instead. Even if you don't learn anything new as such, you get a new perspective to the subject, and that's always helpful. Even when the perspective is disappointingly shortsighted.

So, I watched a french film called Augustine, after one of the most famous hysteria patients of Salpêtrière. This particular rendering of the story concentrates on the relationship of the director, Charcot and his new patient, Augustine who, due to her extraordinarily prominent hysterical symptoms becomes the main interest of the medical team and their research into the puzzling disease. Now, if you look at the promotion picture of this movie below, it is needless to add that in this interpretation, Augustine and Charcot's relationship is erotically loaded, and - spoiler alert! - culminates in sexual intercourse. And therein lies the biggest issue that I have with this film.

old dude on the left is M. Charcot 

Actually, this whole movie is the problem. For me the pros are basically that it looks exactly right, good casting and they are speaking french. Everything else is somehow wrong.
Throughout the history of us humans there have been mental disorders and illnesses, and things about our health and behaviour that we have wanted to explain in a way most easily accepted for the social and moral climate of our culture. Hysteria has had a long and eventful history where it has transformed from an illness of a wondering womb to witchcraft to demonic possession to a symptom of repressed sexual fantasies to a variety of mental and physical disorders known nowadays as epilepsy, multiple sclerosis (MS), hypochondria, dissociative disorders and forms of depression, anxiety and eating disorders. And possibly something else too.
My point is that no one has ever known what hysteria actually is, or if it is a thing in the first place. Thus there is a certain artistic freedom in interpreting it especially in a creative medium such as cinema. However, the film in question has gone down the most obvious and simple route by taking the culturally assigned erotic connotations of hysteria and made them the utmost centre of the narrative. A very good parallel could be A Dangerous Method, set in early 20th century Vienna, at the birthplace of psychoanalysis and around the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, a film which I also didn't care too much about because of similar reasons, but also because the plot made mostly no sense at all.
But let's return to Augustine.

I'm not really that fussed about the film giving an extremely superficial and subjective impression about the whole 'hysteria in Salpêtrière' scenario for the general public, although I would much prefer a more profound and multi-layered presentation, as is also the case with Dangerous Method. Why it really bothers me at the moment, is that being a visual person, images tend to stick with me and become extremely valuable pieces of information in my mind. Imagine that I have this box with the word 'hysteria' written on the lid, and inside is everything that I know of the topic. Mostly it is stuff that I've read from historical, philosophical and medical books, journals, essays etc. Since all of this is stored in my brain, it's not in the form of written notes or Word documents but some complex neurological connections. When I think about hysteria I don't see pages of books in my mind; I just know what I've read. However, when I think about hysteria I do see images that I associate with the topic. I see them as I've seen them in the books or the Internet. And most of all, I see images from the film, Augustine - because of its visual accuracy, I suppose, so I guess a round of applause for the production designer is in order.
The reason why I would not like to see these images as part of my hysteria research - as representing hysteria, is that based on my research they seem inaccurate, artificial and biased.

Of course, it is crucial to come across material that contradicts your own concepts about the research topic, and I do appreciate that point greatly.
I just find these images popping in my mind every now and then quite distracting and irritating. Especially since we are not talking about a scientific or in any way authorised study of hysteria, but another artist's interpretation of the subject where a bunch of facts have been turned into historical fiction - as you do in the film industry, I am aware of that.'

So, now I just have to manage with these pieces of irrelevant information in my brain whilst working on my own mission.

Research Diary: 700 words

I did it! I finally started writing my dissertation! We are some 700 words in woohoo!

Well, it isn't much considering that I still have the remaining 9300 to write, and I'll probably end up deleting most of today's ramblings. Anyhow, it is good to have started. And if I can out of the blue come up with 700 words on just one single image I think I'll manage the rest of it too. To celebrate this accomplishment, and share it with you, I created this highly descriptive visualisation of today's thoughts.

In a nutshell, my very academically high standard notes here are pointing towards the controversies in this image - the juxtapositions of what it resembles and what it is supposed to represent. And let me help you with understanding what that means: the above picture looks like a fashion shot or a glamour photo of a film star, and yet it is a medical photograph demonstrating one of the physical symptoms of hysteria - a contracture. So, that's quite interesting. To me anyway.

Some other things that I've been up to recently are a couple more studio session where I've also filmed moving image. I haven't really looked into those yet, so I can't tell you what I think about them. After a group discussion and a lot of support and interest from my fellow students' and tutor's behalf on last Wednesday, I'm having a good drive to take this project further and further. Thus more banging myself against hard floors and walls in dark spaces lies ahead.

I've also booked train tickets for London where I'm going to do some more research in the shape of a library archive and art exhibitions. I'm quite excited to go out and have a week off from producing work although I'll be writing throughout those six days because anything else is out of the question at this point.

Last week, on our Thursday lecture we were rewarded by a talk from John Wood, one half of the duo Harrison&Wood. He was exceptionally funny, and the way he talked about the work was inspiring. Harrison&Wood work with video on a studio environment where they carry out all kinds of ridiculous experiments, studying how things work and how they could be described in simple ways. As my description is merely words followed by more meaningless words, I will offer you a link to their website which is also quite funny and absurd so good luck with getting the hang of that.

And let's have an inspirational song that is constantly playing in my head.

Research Diary: To Do List

So much to do, so little time. But let's see what kind of quests I have in the near future.

1. Visit an art exhibition in Cardiff. I know it's sad Chinese painting and apparently really good but that's about it, I like surprises. Going to go there today.

2. Get my studio risk assessment sheets signed by one of my tutors. Going to do that tomorrow.

3. Get props for my photoshoots. Need to do today or tomorrow.

4. Make a shooting plan for Friday.

5. Write a proposal for what I'm going to do on our November research week. Due Friday.

6. Contact Wellcome Library in London to book stuff for the research week.

7. Decide which exhibitions I want to see whilst in London.

8. Check out train/bus times and prices.

9. Find out whether I'm eligible for some kind of funding for this research trip.

10. Order a few books through our Interlibrary Loan Service.

11. Make notes of Chapter 3 of Madness and Civilization.

12. Finish the rest of the chapters of Madness and Civilization.

13. And make notes of each of them.

14. Understand what Michel Foucalt is actually on about in Madness and Civilization.

15. Go back to Invention of Hysteria and understand what it all means.

16. Write a review about it.

17. Get going with that bloody dissertation already!

18. Book more studio times.

19. Order some film.

20. Take pictures.

21. Take more pictures.

22. Panic because you have no idea what you're doing.

23. Drink tea.

24. Drink coffee.

25. Stop panicking.

26. Bring something new to every seminar and tutorial.

27. Infuriate all of your friends by constantly talking about new ideas for your project.

28. Write.

29. Write more.

30. Keep writing.

31. Drink coffee.

32. Drink tea.

33. Email tutors in panic.

34. Drink more tea and coffee.

35. Forget to buy Christmas presents.

36. Finish everything on time.

37. Relax.

38. Still keep on writing.

39. And taking pictures.

40. And drinking tea and coffee.

Research Diary: Epiphany?

Did I already point out how fast the time seems to be flying by?
Consequently, today I'll try to be brief with my updates as I want to get back to reading as soon as possible.

So, in the past week I've had two group seminars: one about dissertations, the other about artworks. Regarding my dissertation, after I finish the final chapter of Invention of Hysteria I'll move on to writing a critical review about the book which should help me form my thesis statement. This was a very helpful piece of advice that I got from my supervisor, and I'm increasingly happier that I got into her group. She also suggested Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization for me, and boy am I in love with this book, having only reached the end of the first chapter. The language that Foucault uses is so complex and beautiful that the number of passages that I would like to quote is growing ridiculous. And as I said, I am only on the page 30. Anyhow, here's a sample that I've been reading over and over again, utterly perplexed by its beauty and depth.

"Witness that old image of wisdom so often translated, in German engravings, by a long-necked bird whose thoughts, rising slowly from heart to head, have time to be weighted and reflected on; a symbol whose values are blunted by being overemphasized: the long path of reflection becomes in the image the alembic of a subtle learning, an instrument which distills quintessences. The neck of the Gutemensch is endlessly elongated, the better to illustrate, beyond wisdom, all the real mediations of knowledge; and the symbolic man becomes a fantastic bird whose disproportionate neck folds a thousand times upon itself - an insane being, halfway between animal and thing, closer to the charms of an image than to the rigor of a meaning. This symbolic wisdom is a prisoner of the madness of dreams."

Other things that I got from the dissertation discussion were Lauren Greenfield's documentary project about anorexia, called Thin, and a collection of essays concerning photography, called The Burden of Representation.

To be honest, forming that thesis statement seems a mission impossible at the moment, but I'm just going to stay focused on the research material and have faith: it'll come up. There already is a very interesting relationship with madness and knowledge, suggested by Foucault, and on the other hand photography and knowledge, which is like the core question of photographic theory. Then bringing these ponderings together with the spectacle of hysteria in Salpêtrière - the marriage of madness and photography; I think there might be something there.

How about my art practice then? I just got an epiphany of sorts in this morning's run about my project, and am really excited to work on it.

So, my epiphany. I want to include audio in my work. And I want it to be many languages mushed together so that you can only pick up some words - obviously depending on how exactly how I'm going to edit it. What's it going to be about?
Well, you know how madmen/-women have historically been excluded from the rest of society, locked up in institutions and told they are somehow wrong, second-class citizens. In different times, different kinds of behaviours have been labeled as 'disordered' (e.g. homosexuality), diagnoses have changed, merged and disappeared but some attitudes toward mental problems or psychological disturbances have remained quite unchanged. Throughout Western history of madness, there have always been those who tell depressed, hysterical, manic, anxious and otherwise not-seemingly-controlled people to 'suck it up', 'get over it', don't make a scene', 'you are just seeking attention'.
I have been told some of those things. Some people commit suicide after being dismissed in this way. This is not Medieval or Victorian tragedies: this is our world today.

In my prospective audio piece, I would like to present phrases like shown above from people who have been told that they don't deserve or need any other help but that of someone kicking the in them backside. I'm still working on the strategy of collection this data, but I'm thinking some kind of an anonymous submission form ought to serve.

I have other plans for the installation of the work but I think this will suffice for today.
And I will go back to my books.

Research Diary: studio, field-trip and David Bate

It is Friday morning now, and man does it feel like time is just flying by. But let's go back to the beginning of the week.

On Monday I picked up some new books from the library even though I'm still in the middle of reading Georges Didi-Huberman's The Invention of Hysteria and Andrew Scull's Hysteria: The Disturbing History (and Hannibal but that's not course related, fortunately). I wanted to find out what has been written about women's mental illness in books that are not exclusively about hysteria. So I chose the following three, none of which have I had time to start reading yet.

The following day I started with a three-hour long photoshoot in one our amazing studios on campus. And that's me right there doing un-project-related posing for the camera.

What I actually worked on was a series of images created in the mental ward of the Salpêtrière Hospital in the late 19th century. The neurologist running the institution had come to conclude that hysterics experiencing an attack went through certain predetermined stages which manifested themselves through certain kinds of movements. He drew charts of these phases, and also had his patients acting them out in front of a camera. So that's what I did too; the camera part, not the drawing.

The above is a screenshot of how my Adobe Bridge looked like as I started editing my material. Just click the image too see it bigger.

As you notice it looks pretty much like a series of dance movements; consequently so does the original. And to prove that I'm not making this up, here's the photo set that I used as reference.

Augustine who was everybody's fave in Salpêtrière

What I thought about during my studio session:

1) Augustine was pretty flexible

2) I need a sofa

3) ...or a bed

4) ... or anything soft really because my bones hurt

5) I wonder how long she had to hold each pose

6) these knickers are too bright and shiny white, I need to get a better outfit

7) my back hurts

8) should I use models?

9) ...and a medium format camera?

Then I went to Photoshop and produced this:

And it's like exclusive material - no one except for myself has yet had the honour of seeing it so you should feel special. I have a group seminar next week where I'm going to be discussing this and other things that I've been up to, and will hopefully figure out what I'm going to do next. I have some ideas though but let's see what my peers and tutors think.

 Moving on, the following day we went to Bristol for the whole day to see some exhibitions and meet a few people. This trip was primarily arranged for the first-years but since they had a couple of places left in the coach, a bunch of us third-years tagged along. I personally really enjoy getting to hang out with our tutors outside lectures because they are in such friendly terms with us students.

So, our first stop was at the Bristol Observatory where they had a not-so-impressive camera obscura, and some caves that were frankly lame. Then, after lunch, the coach took us to Spike Island which is this awesome art centre by the riverfront. They had a big show featuring a lot of recent art graduates, called New Contemporaries. It's an annual event that goes to a different venue each year. For me the absolute highlight was finally getting to see Jo Sowden's (graduate from my course in 2012), The Lilies of the Field, which is an absolutely amazing video piece, and a great source of inspiration for me.

You can visit Jo's website here. She was meant to come and meet us at the gallery but unfortunately she couldn't.

A terrible iPhone photo from the exhibition

There was also another former Newport graduate associated with the exhibition - a technician whose name I can't recall. He talked about his job at Spike: art handling, AV stuff, building plinths, putting up art shows etc. He also told us how he got there after graduation, and now I got interested in doing a volunteer placement in a tech job at some point.

Spike Island also has studio spaces for about 100 artists on its top-floor. Two of our tutors actually have their own rooms up there so we got to go and see what a real art studio looks like, which make me want to have one of my own.

Next we stopped by Hello Blue, a printing/mounting company who consequently fabricated my prints last spring for our exhibition. They are truly awesome those two guys, and I hope I get to work with them again.

And on we went, to see a portrait show, and then a solo show of one of our tutors, which was great by the way.

Finally, I'll just briefly mention yesterday's lecture by David Bate, who's a senior lecturer in the University of Westminster, a well-known photography theorist and a practicing artist.

His talk was pretty much the same he gave last year in an event we had at our uni, but since he is such a brilliant speaker I didn't mind at all.

He mostly talked about his own art practice but what I found most valuable personally was his introduction to the talk where he explained a few terms used in the context of looking at different types of art images. It really gave me a few ideas for my dissertation, and I'll probably end up reading the book in which he'd picked up the model was talking about.

It has such a pretty cover too

Research Diary: Inspiring Lectures

On late Wednesday afternoon I ventured in the Cardiff National Museum with a few friends of mine to attend to a lecture about Victorian women's scrapbook tradition in 19th Century England. The talk was given by Dr Patrizia de Bello, a tiny but enigmatic and engaging woman.

The topic as such isn't exactly relevant to my ongoing projects but in my opinion, one should never discard an opportunity of listening to a specialist presenting their research in a beautiful lecture theatre of a big museum just because the content of the talk doesn't directly relate to one's own interests. And besides, you can never know what you can learn.

Anyhow, we went there and my, was that lecture just absolutely fascinating.

It is always such a pleasure to see someone who's clearly 100% committed to their subject, and enjoys sharing the vast knowledge with an audience. The amount of hidden messages and meanings that can be picked up from those Victorian photo-collages is mindblowing. What seems like a silly, childish hobby on the surface, actually depicts complicated quirks of the social structures and games that were so important for the upper social classes of the time. A subtle questioning and criticism of strict gender roles may be read as an undertone of these surreal collages - but it is obviously impossible to say how much of that interpretation is due to pure chance and how much really intentional from the part of the women who put these books together.

What made this particular lecture all the more intriguing to me is that exactly a year ago I was working on a project, quite similar to these scrapbook collages. I, too, was playing with gender roles in a strikingly similar way to some of the images that Dr de Bello showed us - except that before that I wasn't even aware of such a tradition.

As much as I'd love to go on about this lecture I'm going to move on to the next one, because indeed this afternoon, in the great Visiting Lecture programme of my university we had a talk by a photographic artist, now working on his PhD, John Sunderland.

Again we are somewhere else in the art field than in my area but as I said, you can always learn something new. In fact, I like it better when things are not spoon-fed to me but I have to really think and process what I'm being offered.

So, John Sunderland is working on memory and experience in landscape, and lot of his theoretical research is based on phenomenology - a field that I too have briefly explored in one of my previous uni projects. Perhaps the vague familiarity with his topic was one of the reasons why I got absorbed in the presentation. Also, I think there is a part of me that is very attracted to landscape photography even though my current interest in making art lie elsewhere. The idea of sublime in landscapes but also in other associations - that is, something of overwhelming beauty that it is almost terrifying - is something that I find really interesting. What makes an image so powerful, so captivating that it takes the spectator's breath away?

And then he, Sunderland, mentioned something called 'apocalyptic sublime', which is one step closer to the aspect of terror over the magnificence of a view, how it pictures an actual danger that we can safely enjoy without having to physically engage with.

Which brought me back to my own research of images of Victorian madwomen, and how too, their pictures evoke a sense of disturbed fascination in their viewer. The pain, physical and mental, narrated through these photographs is there for us to be seen and analysed along with the horrifyingly cruel treatment methods of the time. But unlike the subjects in the photographs, the glamorised and victimised starlets of hysteria, we have the privilege of being able to stand back and enjoy the spectacle they are presenting to us.

one example of the kind images I'm talking about

To Start a Research Diary

Let's have it said out loud: I have nine months to finish a) a major art project, and b) write a 8,000 to 10,000 word dissertation.

Nine months.

nine

9

months

In reality though, I should be pretty much done by Christmas with the written part.

/death/

So, to keep track of my academic activities while on this quest, I have decided to attempt at keeping a diary of them. I'm going to do it here, in this blog - and I'm going to try my best to do it at least twice a week. These posts won't probably be long, reducing exponentially in word count towards Christmas when you should expect something like this to occur:

"TOday I writes 1000 wordss and deleteds half of  if after draining an xtra large triple shot caramel latte whilst sobbing under the desk SEND HALP..............."

But now, here is my 'post it' - board (= a bunch of A4's taped together) where I regularly write and glue new stuff from books, conversations, websites, tutorials and the depths of my brain.

Making it is actually quite fun and relaxing, and also useful for a visual person like myself.

There you also see my topic, hysteria, which probably doesn't really say anything to most people in the context of art studies but we'll get there. Eventually. Hopefully.

And being the Photoshop savvy individual that I am, I also put together a collage of the books from this area of study that I've read so far.

see, that took a lot of skill to make

And thus we have reached the end of the first page of my new research diary, which means that I can tick a box in the list of my to do's: to start a research diary done.

Manic Episode, Unspecified

As I in my last post referred to, there is indeed a project called Manic Episode, Unspecified, the development of which can be followed through a few older entires in this blog. For some unknown reason though, I never shared the final outcome - hence here it is.

A link to my flickr page ladies and gentlemen!

Sparks of inspiration

It's been an eternity since I last talked about my artistic projects here - quite simply because I haven't been doing anything creative in the lack of inspiration for the past couple of months.

Even now I can't say that I'm working on some defined project, but I do have little bits and pieces that I simply felt like trying out. There is no conscious motive or purpose for the stuff that I've photographed, just a feeling that for some reason I should.

So, I have a lot of scars and bruises mostly from sports, and I just thought that what if I took close-up shots of them because why not.

Then another idea I got was doing something similar to my Manic Episode, Unspecified work where I created images using movement and light fabric in a dark studio. I'm still most intrigued by the use of my body in movement and how I can generate really unphotorealistic visual language with these elements. I'm afraid I'll end up repeating what I've previously done because obviously certain kind of setting produces certain kind of images.
But anyway, this is what came out of using read chiffon and moving around with it in our extremely charming basemen laundry room.

There's something about the colour red that I really wanted in the pictures. I can't exactly pin down why, but it's there and especially the ones where I've used flash have something really cool going on. You see it's all vague et the moment but when you've been feeling empty for a really long time even the tiniest bit of inspiration feels great, and it's so good to be doing something again.

One of my tutors - well, all of my tutors would probably start going on about the symbolism of red. And yeah, I know it signifies a lot of different things from love to war. For me though, bright red has this strength and energy, unpredictability - like fire.
I guess that's enough poetry for one day.

Research Overview

Last time I rambled on about dance, controlling the body and the pursuit of perfection.
Obviously, everything about that project has changed now because that's how art works - most of the time you start with something and end up with something else.

I'm still very much interested in the body and how it's been and is being portrayed in art - and especially nowadays, mass media. I'm interested in dance and photography as the means of investigating that body subject, and how through them, I might bring across both my personal experiences, and universal ideas of the body, physicality - and its connection to the mind.
Also feminism.
And gender stuff.
Always.

Obscure gibberish, I grant you that but trying to briefly sum up my personal approach and main interests isn't as easy as you might assume.
Especially as I tend to get fascinated by just about anything that I come across while doing research. And boy, do I love doing all kinds of research: reading academic text, looking at artist books, going to exhibitions, watching films, studying art history, searching for background info about psychology, philosophy, biology, ... the list is endless.

I'm not gonna lie, my chaotic doing-everything-at-once approach is not likely the most efficient one, and were I to focus my attention on specific things rather than frantically jumping from topic to topic, I might achieve a slightly more concise view on whatever it is that I'm currently working on. But let's leave the topic of my questionable working methods alone and talk about something else.
That something else being my current standpoint in the ongoing project.

In terms of the assignment criteria I have to discuss the issues of power and control in some way, so that's where I have to start - and consequently - where I have to end up if I want to pass. On the other hand, it is also crucial to do something that I find personally significant, something that I want to do. This is a thing that our tutors have really began emphasizing: if it doesn't mean anything to you, and you're only doing it in order to fulfill the brief or please someone else, don't do it - do something else.

Last summer I made a dance-video project about panic and anxiety, but since I never felt finished with the topic, I'm very much moving back to those issues. Only this time I'm working with still images because at the moment video just doesn't feel like my thing at all.

The story of my work is kind of multi-layered so I'll briefly look at each stage ascending from general to specific, universal to personal.

1. Vagueness at its best

I don't, as of yet, have any solid facts to back this up, but perhaps we can overlook that for now. Frankly, today's world - or more accurately, the Western world, which I also inhabit - is socially quite harsh. Fair enough, for a privileged European white girl like me, there are innumerable opportunities and ways to go in life. On one hand, I am strongly encouraged to get a good education, follow my dreams, make the most of my talents; on the other, there is an ever-growing pressure to get us young adults set in professional life as quickly as possible because apparently prolonged student life costs too much for the society.
I guess the whole thing about postmodernism is present here: there are no right answers, no straight paths and in fact, such an amount of contradictory ideals that confusion is inevitable.
That is, being obliged to answer the demands of our parents, our teachers, media and the society while still keeping our own heads clear can be very overwhelming.
Fragmentation.
That is the state of the world, and puzzling out your own life is a massive challenge for many.
So massive indeed, that all kinds of mental disorders have become a normality. An increasing amount of seemingly healthy people regularly see a therapist to keep their assets against stress and anxiety strong. Maybe the ordinariness of various mental and emotional problems is merely due to the fact that every combination of physical and psychical symptoms can nowadays be called something: social anxiety, panic disorder, depression, eating disorder, generalized anxiety, rather than just shrugging such sensations off as hysteria or melancholia - or pain madness.
In short, the socially competitive and demanding lifestyle may have a connection to the commonness of panic and anxiety in today's society.
This is pretty clear though, so I might not necessarily need this level at all. Who knows.

2. Panic and anxiety simplified

Panic attacks have as many triggers as there are panickers. They are highly subjective and personal experiences, but the list of all the possible symptoms of a panic attack goes like this: palpitations, sweating, tingling sensations in fingers, trembling, shortness of breath, hyperventilation, shaking, shivering, churning stomach, choking  sensation, chest pain, nausea, dry mouth, dizziness, feeling faint, numbness, pins and needles, ringing ears, need for toilet, feeling of dread/dying; and depersonalization. Obviously one needn't have to have all of those at once to be diagnosed as experiencing a panic attack.
Panic attacks are often connected to social anxiety, causing them to occur in social situations where, in addition to the unpleasantness of the panic itself one is likely to feel humiliation or embarrassment, and kind of inadequacy as a member of the social event.
Anxiety, general or social, easily becomes a part of somebody's life who has experienced panic attacks. The fear of not being able to control one's feelings in certain situations kicks off a vicious circle where the anticipation of panic feeds anxiety, which culminates in panic.
So, panic and anxiety are inner manifestations of emotional power struggles and the fear of losing control of oneself.
N.B. This is only one way of looking at the issues in question, and you personal experience of panic and anxiety might be completely different. In addition to investigating this subject matter as a whole, I also need to focus on things that will link to the more general issues that I am supposed to be discussing through this project - power and control that is.

3. Psychoanalysis, of course

Of course I need a theoretical position as well, and there's something about my work visually that connects it to psychoanalysis. This is a very vague description but apparently, according to Freud, bodily fragmentation in dreams has something to do with anxiety. But since we are talking about Freud, the anxiety is obviously caused by sexual repression or some oedipal conflict dating from childhood.
So yeah.
That's there, and surrealism, which is plainly based on the idea of subconscious, which originates from psychoanalysis, has had a great impact on my visual language. But I will promptly deny any suggestions of childhood traumas or repressed sexual fantasies.

But let's have some images. First of all, Dalì because he was probably the first artist whose name actually stayed in my head, and that says a lot as I generally suck with names. I can't really pinpoint any favourites from his extensive work of life - it is mainly just the entirety of his creation that fascinates me.

an example that may or may not have a connection to my work

Another surrealist artist from around the same period of time is Hans Bellmer whose extremely disturbing doll sculptures and drawings are nothing if not creepy, sexual and misogynist. And yet...visually so interesting.

these are the easy and nice ones

 

And then I'll just have throw in some Francesca Woodman because I am continuously drawn back to her work no matter how many times I look at and analyse it.

I don't actually have an epic bottom line for this aspect so let's move on.

4. In practice

What am I actually doing then? I'll show you two pictures and then talk about them in a few words.

I apologize for the darkness and smallness but that's as good as you're going to get at this stage.

Anyway, there are the fragmentation and surrealism, detachment that links to depersonalization that I listed as symptoms for panic attack. These two are in no way an exemplary representation of the variety of photographs that I have taken so far, nor are they the best or the worst - bare in mind that at the moment I have 200+ pictures on my hard drive and more to be made in next weeks 9 hours of studio time so things might drastically change.
However, my working method is consistent, and has its part to play in this power and control scenario that our final exhibition is going to be built around. First of all, every time I pick up a camera, I have the control in my hands. The photographer makes the decisions of what to show, when and how. Photography is not an objective medium in any way: the camera has its own anatomy and technology, and the means to produce images, but it is the photographer who decides what to include inside the frame.
A dancer is in total control of her body. She knows exactly what her body is doing at any give moment, she instantly knows if she has made a mistake. Classical ballet is all about bodily and interpretive perfection. Contemporary dance has a different language but it is a descendant of classical ballet even though it is influenced by other dance styles. Contemporary dancer is as much in control of her body as a ballerina.

The way I create these images is setting the camera in self-timer that takes nine shots in a row whilst I am dancing, improvising to the music of my choice.

The keywords, self-timer and improvising, are vital for the issues of power and control here because both of them are ways in which I let go of the power that I have over the outcome of the work. I am still in control of the lighting, the camera angle, the camera settings, the clothing and the music that inspires the way I move in front of the camera. But moving without a choreography, and letting the mechanics of the camera take the photos I am balancing in between losing and having control.

5. Personal touch

There are multiple reasons as to why this project is personally a meaningful one. I am something of a perfectionist by nature, I like feeling in control of myself and the things that I do. I like knowing exactly how I appear to others, how I look, how I sound, how I seem. I don't give my trust easily to anyone and I keep a certain distance.
I used to have huge issues with improvisation in dance classes because I couldn't detach myself from the situation and what others were doing. I was, and continue to be, uncertain of my talents and nervous of creating my own in the fear of being told that I suck. I am self-conscious of my technical inadequacy, and the fact that I'm not as skinny as I'd like to be.
Every now and then, under a considerable amount of stress, I get panic attacks and anxiety.
So, trust issues, control-freakiness, panic - the whys for having an urge to attempt some art creation about this delightful topic.

And that's about it. A terribly long entry, I have to admit, but it has helped me to clarify my thoughts on this project as well as pointed out some questions I still need to ponder over.
Which is essentially why I have this blog in the first place.

Ideas of Perfection

While the uni project of doom that I talked about in my previous entry still occasionally comes back to haunt me I have gladly left it behind and focused my mind on new challenges. The topic of this new assignment is photography's relationship to power and control, looking, voyeurism, surveillance etc. The introductory lectures to kickstart this project circled mostly political issues of power and control, images of suffering, fascism and other utterly cheerful stuff like that. I was downright miserable after most sessions, carrying the weight of the world upon my shoulders. To my start-up tutorial I went pretty much empty-handed, clueless as to what I wanted to do; or more accordingly uncertain whether anything that I possibly fancied doing would be appropriate for such a heavy subject matter.

Chatting with my tutor proved to be a fruitful and heartening event since her approach was absolutely to help me do whatever I would best like to do, and not demand a meticulously structured plan for the project just yet.

So, what would I like to do? Something dance-related.

And what is dance essentially about? Control of the body, and if we are talking about classical ballet: perfect control of the body. Just like magic, we have a topic to base my research on: perfection. There are so many things that make this subject matter a perfect choice for me. First off, I am something of a perfectionist myself, and treating the issue of perfection as a research topic as well as a personal link to the project keeps me attached to it in a quirked sort of way where I'll probably get really frustrated but still strangely drawn to it. Having to deal with the fact that I want this work, which is about perfection to be perfect, adds another level to it - I believe.
I love photography and I love dance, and figuring out how to combine them into something more is a challenge that I'm more than willing to take. I have a history of practicing different types of dance, which allows me to experiment using myself as a model - logistically simpler than calling out for dancers compliant to volunteer helping out an indecisive and impulsive photo art student who most of the time has no idea what she's doing. This is not to say that I can't and won't use somebody else in the final pieces of work - as it happens, that tutor of mine knows a couple of professional ballet dancers, with whom I might be able to collaborate. A thrilling prospect to be sure.
Being more or less hooked in sports, as well as having competed and performed in various instances, I absolutely get that eternal thrive towards a flawless performance. How you can never actually achieve perfection, and how that will only drive you to work harder.

There is also the historical backstory which extends back to the Greek Classicism and the adoration and idolization of athletes in Ancien Greece. The extremely detailed, muscled and dynamic sculptures of heros and Gods from the Greek mythology are the ultimate beauty ideals still in the 21st century. That heritage of a concept of beauty goes through the history of Western art, and looking for traces of it in different eras is something that I'm completely enthralled with.
Then there's the practice of sport photography that follows certain rules - looking for the perfect shot of a specific event. How, when put next to each other, it's really the same photograph over and over again; and how still that same photograph of athletes manifesting their divine prowess in their area of expertise gets repeated time and again.

But that's enough rambling for a day.

I've already done one studio shoot with myself, and it was really about playing around and trying on things. I had a lot of fun - apart from the fact that apparently I've managed to pull my right buttock now and walking is a bit awkward.

here's just some movement I dunno what to make of it

slightly surreal legs and some muscles

I kind of like that blurriness and how it seems to remind us of photography's inability to represent movement; but also how it's kind of more truthful than spot-on sharp dance images where the exposure time is just fractions of a second.

And then I had to take and Photoshop a hipster-y self-portrait because that camera angle + lighting just makes everything look good.

someone looks grumpy