Photographs Of Final Outcomes

Evaluation

Throughout this project i feel i have gained a stronger knowledge of the history of collage and realised i can use it to create more professional outcomes. Just because its a simplistic technique doesn't mean it is restricted or has limits and using scans and adding a third dimension can help provide refined outcomes.
In terms of material experimentation, i feel i have used the correct medias to represent my ideas. This is because i have been influenced by the way my chosen artists use their art to portray a message and i feel this may be where there is room for improvement and progression with my art. I will take this forward in future projects and especially on the remainder of the course as we head towards the final major project.
As i have worked my way through the project i feel my blog has worked as an evaluative source, here i have been able to reflect on each of my experimental collages and paintings and seen how they develop with my influences, research and feedback from peers and tutors. As a response to feedback, i have developed my materials and processes to move my work from one stage to the next and been able to have a clear structure to the way i have worked.
In terms of meeting my project deadline i have worked with a lot more precision and time management to complete my works in time. I have alongside my outcomes produced my portfolio for my course interview for next year, including a digital portfolio and this has completed unit 4 of my body of work. This is something i have always struggled to manage to i am please with the progress i have taken from my previous project.
On the other hand, i see room for improvement on the quality of some of my experimentation and i feel my blog has worked well, but it means my sketch book has become a lot rougher and some of the sketches and observational drawings in particular haven't been presented as well as they should have done. I need to find a way to make my sketch book and blog work alongside one another.
I have really been inspired by the work of Linder in particular in this project, and i'd like to find out a lot more about her work and see if i could go and see some of it or find out more about the history of her influences and discover artists more similar. I have gained more ideas from looking at her work and it has led me to experiment with images of the female body naked or for pornographic use. I could take this a lot further. This has been how my visual research has progressed and although my project started with my family members they weren't the correct type of visual sources to be part of my outcomes and experimentations. They did not give enough of a strong message for what i wanted to portray.
I am still hoping to use my portfolio of work to gain a place onto my chosen course which is a foundation degree in Arts and Wellbeing at city college.

Final Scans

These are my Three final scans. Although the quality isn't perfect, i like the effect it creates. It makes the images look fake and in turn this is representing the fake nature of the women portrayed in the media, for example the 'lads mag' i took these particular ones from. These collages are to be taken and mounted onto foamex, before i add a collection of googly eyes more similar to one of my more previous callages on canvas. I will decide which order to hang them once i have created them and can see how they look in the space provided.

Final Experimentation

 Here i have used another different media to base my project on. I have painted onto a mirror and used fake eyelashes so create a more three dimensional effect. I wanted to try adding something new to the standard canvas/paper collage, and although i think it looks effective overall, the paint went very see-through and it was hard to find correct proportions when using this media. This along with the fact my canvases didn't scan very well have made me resort back to paper for my final outcomes.

Gee Vaucher

Gee vaucher
Inside Out






















After looking through some of her work, i have noticed slight links between my project and the collages by visual artist Gee Vaucher. After reading about her, i have enjoyed discovering how she sees her works as 'a tool for social change', similarly to a lot of the female artists i have researched. She also uses surrealist styles and methods in her works. Although East London born, Dagenham to be exact, Vaucher started to gain recognition through her record cover designs. Linder also designed record covers which were similarly shocking and politically outspoken. Vauchers work became a strong influence for protest art and this led as a helping hand to social change whilst exposing the flaws of society.

Refined Experimentation

These pieces are done on various sized canvas panels. Here i have used images from magazines which are not just of the female form, as i have been previously experimenting with, but of objects similarly to how Linder works.
For example the coffee in this particular image spilling onto the chest of the woman. I have also included hair dye onto the black and white image and googly eyes along with a collaged image of a female i have taken.









This canvas features images from a 'lads mag' of a female chest in a provocative form. The entire magazine was full of women making a living out of objectification of their bodies, this is what lead me to distort my final outcome using a watercolour wash and i like the effect it has. It gets across the message i wanted to reinforce of negativity towards the female representation in the media. Again, i have used some of my own imagery and acrylic paint.

These Two canvases are more similar to the collages i have had in mind. They are going towards some of my refined outcomes because i feel they capture a the ironic and mimicking nature i wanted to portray of how women are represented and objectified in the media.

Thomas Hirschhorn

Contemporary swiss artist Thomas Hirschorn has become well known for his transformational work in which he takes white cube spaces and creates environments displaying issues surrounding a manner of theorys, politics and consumerism.

Similarly to my own work, he combines found imagery with texts, cardboard, foil, tape and a range of other materials. He uses his scavenging overload to create collage based works which are designed to question us.

Created with the most basic everyday materials, I really enjoy the way a few of his works can create a concern on topics of justice, power and moral responsibility. Specifically, this collages’ use of the eyes triggers a relation to my own pieces, as they have featured quite widely subconsciously the most of the facial features. I think this is because my work is based on representation and using your eyes to actually look instead of just seeing and accepting the view of women in the media. This is something I am intending on making more obvious as I head towards the creation of some of my final outcomes.

The overload of female figure and the eye make the meaning evident in this collage and you can sense the feelings in the creator.

“A collage is an interpretation. An interpretation that wants to create something new. Doing collages means to create a new world with existing elements of this world. Everyone has once in his life made a collage and everybody is included in a collage. Collages possess the power to implicate the other immediately. I like the capacity of non-exclusion of collages and I like the fact that they are always suspicious and not taken seriously. Collages still resist consumption, even if­­ - like everything - they have to fight against glamorousness and fashionability. I want to put together what cannot be put together, I think that’s the aim of a collage and it’s my mission as an artist.” - Thomas Hirschhorn.

Linder Sterling and Allen Jones

Linders' montages reflect more closely to the sort of composition i would like to create in my own collage. Although i haven't been able to find a book in the library, I have really enjoyed looking at her different works on the internet and seeing how she often combined image from pornographic mags with images from fashion and domestic magazines. She is making a very clear point about societies expectations of women as a stereotype and how the female body is objectified.

Linder
Untitled

1976

Printed papers on board

370 by 300mm

Linder Sterling was a radical feminist born in Liverpool who was part of the punk culture. To the right is one of her collages in a series of untitled pieces created in 1977-8, it was used as the basis for the cover of the single 'Orgasm Addict', a song by punk band Buzzcocks. Although a very simple composition, it is very effective and this is something my work needs to give it the aggressive edge i want to portray.
It shows a naked woman in a seductive pose with smiles for nipples and an iron for a head. My interpretation of the whole piece is that it gives a picture of strength instead of seduction, through the oily body which i know i see as common in body builders. This is probably due to my demographics and the society i have grown up in. I really like the montage and can see why Linder is a feminist icon.

I came across this on the Tate website and found it really interesting.

"The late ‘70s were pre-style press, so the images of food, washing machines or record players came from mail order catalogues and mainstream women’s magazines such as Woman’s Own. In the British pornography I used – Fiesta, Men Only – the bodies weren’t toned or airbrushed and pubic hair wasn’t shaved, so there’s a real physicality to them. Now we’re fairly at ease with that kind of imagery, but back then women wouldn’t have been expected to know about porn, let alone look at it or make work with it."

Here is another image of a piece from the untitled collection of montages by Linder.

Linder
Untitled
1976
printed papers on paper
279 x 196 mm

The image shows a couple locked in a romantic embrace, i think i was struck by the womans eyes in this particular work because they link closely to the recent googly eyes i have been using.
I see a woman in a stereotypical lovers role who actually wants to gouge her eyes out. It says not every woman wants a stereotypical 'loving embrace' as society says.


I am now planning on working towards some more finalised pieces, i am going to try working using flat canvas. Hopefully using influence from Linder and 'Lads Mags' to create work with more of a strong message.

Allen Jones

I found some information on the Tate website about Allen Jones, who is best known for sexually provocative sculptures like Chair (1969) which present the female figure as a piece of furniture. He was visited by ‘tateshots’ at his London studio to find out how he progressed from painting and drawing the human body to producing life-size mannequin sculptures that, as he puts it, ‘were very much made to offend the accepted canons of what fine art might be’.

He also says, ‘what I am trying to do is create something that has an iconic presence’.

According to the man himself, by around the mid-sixties, Allen Jones’ artwork honed in on the female figure. His work at this stage was graphically flat, and bending paper and taking the figure out of the canvas added a new dimension to his work. This is what kicked off the following 20 years of sculpture exploring the female form. His natural talent lied in drawing and taking it to a third dimension added an entirely new creative flow. He took mannequin away from the surrealist idea, progressing to take it away from a fine art prospect and turning the female form into furniture.

Allen Jones (born 1937)
Chair
1969
Acrylic paint on glass fibre and resin with Perspex and leather
775 x 571 x 991 mm

In Jones's view ‘because these 3 sculptures of women are recognisably representational it is less obvious that the sculpture is not about being naturalistic. They are not so much about representing woman but the experience of woman, not an illusion’.

'The erotic impulse transcends cerebral barriers and demands a direct emotional response. Confronted with an abstract statement people readily defer to an expert; but confronted with an erotic statement everyone is an expert. It seems to me a democratic idea that art should be accessible to everyone on some level, and eroticism in one such level’.

Those two quotes are two I found interesting from Allen Jones. In a similar way to his use of his work as a challenge against the perceived idea of what fine art may be, I intend to use the female form through my work as an object. Objectification of women through the media is the main idea behind this entire project, therefore this work closely relates to mine (even if not in the same form of media). I want to take his idea of eroticism and work it in with how Linder, as another example, uses it as a shock factor. My work is made to act as an ironic realisation, so pornographic or general male orientated magazines should provide me with the reaction and opinion I want to provoke in a viewer.

After further research I have discovered these other pieces by Jones which provide female forms in collaged screen prints. Although untitled and I can’t find out much about them, the images chosen in the works provoked a reaction in me that I am hoping to portray through my own pieces.

This untitled screenprint collage was created throughout 1976-7 onto paper. Although the dimensions are unconfirmed, according to tate it is 502 x 702 mm.

I am finding this piece incredibly difficult to discover information on; however, I really like how Jones has taken erotic or sexually appealing images of women from the media and placed them together to create an ironic composition which provokes the reaction I am trying to get in my own work. From this, i am going to try and use domestic settings in my collages and combine them with erotic imagery of women.

In the middle of the image is an article taken from a newspaper which begins with a series of rhetorical questions aimed at a female audience, for example ‘do your girlfriends feel sorry for you because you have such a poor figure?’ and goes on using the power of advertising to make the reader question their self-confidence and develop a need for their product.

It is completely patronising and if I read this extract in a newspaper of today I can only imagine the amount of complaints about it. In a ‘lads mag’ I have got recently there are lots of quotes from the women saying things such as ‘I love wearing my best black lingerie around the house’ and more similar. These are aimed at men admittedly, but because of how society and the media has moved on since the time of the piece, these are more the sorts of things that are being used by magazines which are demeaning and put stereotypes of women in place.