As I was struggling to think of ideas at the beginning of this project, I decided to just start making. As my previous project had dealt with my old dairy and self-reflection on a period of my life – I began writing out my thoughts towards conceptual art. The following image shows my four initial pieces. They are simple yet hold a lot of meaning as they indicate my opinions, struggles, and attitude towards the work I was set out to do at the time. I have never properly researched conceptual art in the past, so felt I was lacking knowledge and inspiration. I have also realised that when making art, I am concerned with being perceived as ‘tacky’ or cliché. I displayed this in the fourth piece of this miniseries writing ‘I ASSUME THIS HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE’ which I intentionally placed below the other three pieces as it feels like an afterthought regarding the other three.
My next direction was focusing on using mirrors. After doing some research and looking back to my previous project, I thought that it could be an interesting concept to do something relating to self-reflection. I started with writing ‘YOURSELF’ on to a mirror. The idea behind this was relating to what you see in the mirror, stating the obvious.
Developing this idea, I thought it would be interesting to play on how others see you while you are reflecting on yourself by looking in the mirror. I did this by first taking photographs of the back of a friend’s head. I then printed these photographs out and cut the background out. I stuck this on to the mirror and retook the photos with my friend staring at the back of her head in the mirror. The angle of the photograph was particularly important as I wanted to capture the same angle as the original photograph, so it was obvious she was staring at what I was seeing from standing behind her. I got a few which indicated this idea, but I wasn’t fully satisfied. So, I took photographs from my desired angle and used Photoshop to edit myself out of the background. These are the results;
I think this could have been executed better from practicing with Photoshop more. Because of this, I didn’t feel it was the right path to go down for the rest of this project.
Keeping my last project in mind, I thought of confessions and using my diary for material for text. I asked a few people in my class to write down a secret which may or may not be true. They each wrote a sentence on a small scrap of paper and gave them back to me. When in my process of creating, I find it beneficial to hang up my work. I hung these secrets on the wall – and accidentally stuck one with the words facing the wall. As it had been written in black ink, I found it interesting that I could only just make out what the writing said. I was inspired by this, linking to the idea of lack of honesty relating to what I had originally asked them to consider when writing the secret. I carried on sticking some of the secrets face down;
Experimenting with this idea, I wrote out a few sentences relating to my first few pieces. As pen wasn’t the best to see through paper, I tried using ink as I thought this would be easier to see through paper. As ink is a wetter medium, I thought that the text would transfer on to the paper it was pressed on. However, it felt inadequate as it didn’t seem to have as big as an impact as I would have liked it to – so I didn’t further either of these techniques.
Next, I simply started writing out the secrets on to scraps pieces of paper – the background cut outs from the mirror pieces mentioned above. I specifically mention the importance of the paper being these scraps as I was drawn to the shapes.
I used a few different methods with these secrets. Some I simply wrote out multiple times, some I tried to cover by scribbling over etc. This led to this piece which I am particularly fond of;
One of my hobbies in my own time is sewing. I was at home embroidering to stick things onto my backpack when I noticed the reverse side of what I was creating. I became captivated by what it looked like, and the inability to clearly see the design on the other side. I thought I could use this in my college work as it linked to hiding or altering the secrets. I started sewing these secrets on to paper and small pieces of material.
Hanging up on the wall, I placed a few face down in attempt to hide what the secret said – just like the initial written secrets from my peers. I was also intrigued by the idea that I could have lied to the viewer about there being a secret on the other side – when really, I have sewn random shapes to imitate text.
When receiving feedback, I was asked for my reasoning behind using the material and colour of thread I had used, as well as why I used embroidery to write the secrets. I was advised to question the reasoning behind the media and colour I use in my work and its importance. Initially, my notes in response to this feedback centered around feminism. I thought of my own mother sewing, as well as women in history sitting by the fire spending hours sewing a story into a piece of cloth. I was beginning to consider how I could explore the theme of femininity by talking to my peers about growing up as a woman and all the excitement, embarrassment and worries that come with it. I wrote down some quotes and key words which I planned to sew on to fabric.
However, from here, my work took a significant turn. I realised that my original reasoning behind using embroidery as my medium and the colours didn’t really have any particular significance… they were simply created from whatever scraps of material I had in my sewing box, and whatever colour caught my eye. I spoke to my friends about this and we agreed that not every decision or piece of art has some great rationale to it, and that creating something just because you like how it looks or its whatever you had available is justified in its own right.
I did however feel slightly uneasy about going down this route as I felt it was a potentially risky decision. The previous discussion of feminism united with the medium I was using made sense and I feel I could have successfully created art from this idea… however, I wanted to push myself and take the risk as I feel that is important in furthering myself as an artist. I think it also links to the conceptual art movement and how artists were going against what art was traditionally expected to look like or mean.
To help with my new turn in this project, I took a break from working to do some research. When looking at the work of John Baldessari, a renowned conceptual artist who died in the early days of this year, I read one of his interviews from one of his most recent series titled ‘The Emoji Series’. This series comprised of pictures of iPhone Emojis blown up in scale on a white background sitting above a single short sentence. In this interview, Baldessari was questioned to the reason behind the scale of the emoji to which he responded, “I just wondered what they’d look like.”. This fit perfectly to my idea as it confirmed that even some of the most well-known artists in the conceptual industry don’t always have an elaborate reason behind why they do certain things in their art – verifying what I had been questioning following my feedback. I stuck with this exact quote in my resolved piece as seen below. I also made a piece reading ‘YOUR INTERPRETATION MATTERS’ as that’s what I was questioning – does the artists reasoning make the piece or is the viewers interpretation the most important in art?
I did find that while pondering these questions over hours of stitching, that there was a reason behind why I was making this art… Even if I wasn’t aware of it, whether it be subconsciously or accidentally, I believe that something led me to creating what I was creating at that moment – which means that there was a meaning.
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