The collages:
This week, I finalised the collages, for which I decided to change my appearance in the scenes to the glowing entity seen above. When preparing to add myself to the living room collage, I felt as though the pieces were missing an element, causing me to reflect on how I not only view my surroundings in these situations but also myself, leading to the development that I often lack a connection to my body, viewing it aesthetically as something I enjoy decorating but not really viewing it as myself, often there’s a frustration built up within this thought in regards to the limitations of my physical form in contrast to how I feel, leading me to depict this within the collages through a burst of bright multicolour light.
To progress this piece further, besides incorporating sound, I want to contrast the collages with reality to depict the truth beyond an “unreliable narrator”. I’m considering overlaying the images onto videos of the actual spaces, further expanding the multi-media collage with traditional pen and paint, photography, digital drawing, video and sound.
My feelings towards this project remain complicated. At the same time, I love the contrasting mediums and have had fun creating the work, but a biased perfectionist element still prevents me from being fully satisfied with the piece. However, I hope this mindset will change to be positive when incorporating the video and sound next week.
In class:
This week in class, we worked on planning out potential workshop ideas for week nine, which will be pitched in week seven as a Pecha Kucha presentation (20 slides x 20 seconds). Reflecting on my analysis of my current project this week, I wanted to explore an individual’s identity further and express the confrontation and pressure in doing so.
Initially, I considered a self-portrait, a collage with the freedom to appear however the student pleases. However, I rejected this idea as we had already done a practical involving collage, and the need to incorporate sound felt forced into my initial ideas. In addition, I wanted to prohibit too much freedom of expression and instead encourage thought on the limitations we face concerning identity for various reasons.
This led me to the concept of expression through sound, based on environment, inspired by my site-specific sound project. As a base concept, the workshop will involve self-expression through sound, with the challenge being the inability to bring anything from outside the room, only using what is already present on the day, followed by a presentation of said sound and discussion at the end of the workshop.