Tumblr Account Artist Research and Inspiration Amy Claxton Studio Practice 4 BA Hons Fine Art Yr2
Through out this project I have been keeping a blog on tumblr where I have been posting any inspirations and artist research which has informed my project. I have found this method extremely helpful as it meant that every artist, method and inspiration I have looked at through out the whole project has been documented, I am also able to look back on my research at anytime and add to it the research whether I am at home, university or anywhere else. Tumblr also allows my to get my work seen by other artist in the world and gain feedback from people I would not be able to reach other wise.
I came across these images when researching Wreck and Ruin, it depresses me to see such beautiful things abandoned and unloved but at the same time the decay that has occurred over time is beautiful in a different way. It then looks haunting and a background develops in your mind. I begin to wonder what happened for it to be abandoned and I imagine what it could be in the future whether developed or left to decay for longer.
This is a video, it shows the decaying of the wallpaper over a period of time sped up. Its interesting to me to see how decay actually happends rather than just the end result.
Although not directly connect to books, I was attracted to this because it shows deconstruction of an object. All the insides of the clock are exploding out of it, the thing I found most interesting was the amount of items inside the clock, I never realised how much was inside such a basic object.
I mainly liked these because they are 3D, I mainly work in 2D so it was an area I did not consider. After seeing these art works I then explored the idea in my own work by creating chains make from book pages and book folding techniques.
Much like the abandoned themeparks I just find it insane that after an olympic event is over often the sites just get completely abandoned. I never realised this happned, I just assumed that after the olympics something else would be built instead. It has a saddening effect to me that something that was once a world known event that was such a big important thing that people trained there whole lives for became something so run down and forgotten.
This idea ultimately came to nothing, I was again trying to explore the idea of using the books and book pages in a more 3D way. The photos came out really well but I just didnt find them interesting at all and I do feel they wouldnt be to other people either. It didnt connect to my project like I thought it would.
I found this relevant due to the simplistic way of wrecking something. The rips in the painting make the painting itself stand out even more.
Matthew Higgs work is very much like mine with his use of book pages and and the accentuation of specific texts which is something I have explored in quite a lot of my work. In my work I have mainly explored the opposite, in that I crossed out the words in order to make other words stand out more.
Initially I wanted to make my project based on wreck and ruin, my project since has been steered away from this idea but these art works are basically the remanence of an actions. It looks as though something large has been thrown at the way causing cracks and dents. Much like the abandoned places I have previously looked at they cause me to wonder what caused the damage.
These are two art works I have made which combine a childrens book with a book on minerlas. I wanted to explore the bounderys between genres that are not normally seen together and make works which work together despite the difference they contain. The first piece is one my favourites of this project, the two images just happened to perfectly line up with each other and both the subjects glasses line sup completely which is my favourite part of the image.
Although very well known and maybe cliched, I have always loves this quote. Im not even a big fan of Alice In Wonderland but this quote makes perfect sense to me as I believe that the weirdest ideas make the best art work.
These are images from a completely uninhabited abondoned town in America. This is an extention of my research into abandoned places, to abandon a whole town is at a whole another level to themepark or olympic stadium which is so strange to me that another town hasnt been built there or that not even one person has chosen to stay there.
I liked this because it uses the same concept as a lot of the work I have been doing. Such as my work with the owl and the mans faces connected., it layers two images together which perfectly connect.
I have experimented with blocking out the eyes in images and crossing out the names and words such as he, she, her, whose.. I did this to elliminate peoples identities making the images or texts have the emotion removed. This is clearly a war time images which would ordinarily comw with a vast amount of emotion but by removing there faces it removes the identity which in turn removed the emotions attached.
These are two of my art works, they both show a change of identity. The first piece I was trying to add a layer to the book sleeve which would chage the way the book is percieved, it make the book a secondary subject. In the second image I add the body of the author character to the authors head, it shows a colliding of reality and fiction. The man who wrote the book has become the book.
I made a few attemps at book folding and I enjoyed it a lot. It was really relaxing and simpler than it first looked, I did however have trouble making the fold even because the more I folded the more the book wanted to close. The books more than triples in size so after folding half of the book all the folds start getting in the way and make it really difficult to get the folds close to the spine.
I found this artist interesting because he uses folding to distort faces which is very similar to what I have been doing to texts and images. The difference is these pieces uses a much more intricate fold to distort that the folds I have been using, I also used the method of cutting out part for the text and re connecting it. I really like the 3D aspect of these artworks.
Statement I have visited charity shops and old bookstores since I was a child and decided for this project that I would start my project off here because it is somewhere I have never explored within my artwork despite my interest. I visited the Demelza Book Store, Oxfam and small bookstores in Whitstable and Herne Bay, spend hours riffling through piles of old unloved books finding children's tales, adult literature, maps, reference books and torn up classic novels until I had a collection of books to use a materials for my artwork. Although I do love to read my main interest in books is not the reading of them but the way every book is different, the smells, the wear and tear, the place I bought it. Every book contains memories I will never know, of homes they have lived in, the people who have previously read them, who first bought the book and where or why they did. They have discolored spines from lifetimes of being the only part of the book exposed on a book shelf and perfectly coloured sleeves that have been protected by the other books on the shelf. They smell musty and dusty, some smell like other peoples homes. Books embody a mystery I will never know and when I make art work out of them it feels like I am the end of this line of mystery because no one will own the books after me but what I have come to realize is that this is not the case, what I am doing is capturing the mystery not ending it. Within my project I wanted to find the narrative within the book and not just within the obvious text but within the narrative we will never know for sure. I explored the changing of a text by removing personality from the pages, crossing through any word describing a person or a persons name, I used pages as the background for new things such as coffee spills, drawings and doodles, I cut up pages and re assembled them to create something new and combining the cut up pieces of different books and connecting them through painted imagery creating a blending of two stories. I wanted to use books are as background for new things, by doing this creating a new narrative that can be seen and known by others not just a marking or folded corner that is a mystery years later. My project consists of a collection of art works which explores these ideas, overall I feel that my work conveys these ideas the way I wanted. When viewed as a whole my work is a mass of memories, mysteries, adulthood, childhood and most importantly stories. Whether unknown stories or stories that are maybe more clear and well told. I wanted the viewer to feel those stories and have the viewers mind create narratives for the work as a whole or separately and for the work to say something different to everyone. I am pleased with the outcome of my project and I think that if I were to have more time on this project I would explore the more 3D side of the work because although this is a present part of my collection of work, 2D work is the main focus.