In my art 3 Personal Investigation, I plan to follow a theme of 'mental health issues on LGBT+ people.' This topic is very personal to me as I am going to use it to find out why and the reasons behind statistics such as 'a member of the LGBT+ community is in grades 7-12 found that gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth were more than twice as likely than their heterosexual peers to have attempted suicide and were more likely to have completed suicide. Six times as likely to experience high levels of depression and eight times as likely to attempt suicide in their young adult years.' [1] Being a part of the LGBT+ community myself and also have experienced problems with mental health in the past I want to explore this and create pieces of artwork to represent the feelings and thoughts I was having during this period of time in my life and describe it through the medium of art and hopefully making my final piece an installation and focusing specifically on the mediums of texture, colour and form.
[2]
My first artist for my art 3 personal investigation is Tadeusz Machowski. Machowski was born in 1955 in Lancut, Poland. Since his early childhood, his main passion was all kinds of art. He has been developing his talent by creating realistic landscapes for about twenty years. Then, inspired by early twentieth century art, Tadeusz started looking for some other kinds of depicting reality and expressing emotions. Drawing inspiration from artists that had been created between 1940 and 1960, he started to work on his own abstract style.
To describe this piece to someone who can't see it I'd start off by saying that the background looks as if it was created by paint being dragged in swift motion and then almost as if it has been washed away in certain areas to build up the ideas of layers all the different tones running throughout this piece. I really like the way the paint is applied as it reminds me of almost hallucinogenic colours, and I feel if I was to add colours to my pieces due to my theme narrowing me down on colour choices due to it being quite dark I would have to add the colours in a similar technique to this in order to keep that subtlety by still have the hints of colour. I would then also further describe it by saying that there is occasional paint drips every now and again and these paint drips seem to be colours that are the complementary colours to what colour the background is and this only emphasises the effect created by all these layers of paint.
The formal elements used in this piece are tone and colour. Colour is used in this piece not only in the layers of colour to create what I feel is quite a hallucinogenic piece all together making you want to keep looking at it this is again helped by the paint splats that are complementary colours to what colour is on the background behind it, always drawing your focus towards the centre of the piece. The element of tone is used by just looking at the amount of different shades of each colour is on the piece reinforcing the almost hallucinogenic vibe I get from this piece of work and I want to create almost the same effect in my work later on down the line.
This piece of artwork is composed with the focus being in the middle of the piece where most of the paint splatter and layers of paint and all the different tones and shades are with the further out of the centre of the piece you get there being less colour and layers of paint and it becomes more washed out and almost like it has been blurred. This piece I feel is very hallucinogenic because with the centre of the piece being in the middle and there being so much to look at you could easily star at this piece for ages and just get lost in it even though on the surface it seems quite a simple piece and I want to replicate this sort of simplicity in my work but as you look at it closer you start to break down barriers and discover the very deep and personal meaning behind my pieces of work and the project as a whole.
After researching about Machowski I discovered that his reasoning behind these pieces is Tadeusz finds inspiration from abstract expressionism of the mid 1940’s. The art movement had an immeasurable influence on the many varieties of work that followed it, especially in the way its artists used colour and materials. Machowski's works hope to capture some of the energy and excitement of the movement, yet strive to reflect his own sense and vision of reality within a contemporary context.' I feel he means this by he really wanted to experiment with his new found love for creating expressive artwork, but also wanted to show how excited the whole art community was about these new found styles of art and new ways to experiment with old materials in completely new ways.
The elements I am going to be taking from Machowski's work is his use of colour and also the way he applies this colour to create this hallucinogenic effect that I feel this piece creates as I want to bring this way of applying paint and adding it to my knowledge of texture and creating some very bizarre and thought provoking pieces as I really want people to question what my topic is about and allow people to come up with their own ideas and interpretations of my work. I also want to do this because it's something I'm still not greatly confident about talking about so I want to mimic this by not disclosing what my theme of my work is until people actually see it and ask me what it is about.
[3]
The second artist for my research investigation is Henk Peeters, he was born in 1925 in The Hague, in the Netherlands.Peeters uses his work to make the viewer conscious of his environment; he wants to bring about a sensitive consciousness. Henk Peeters studied Fine Art at the Koninklijke Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague and taught from 1957 until 1972 at the Art Academy in Arnhem, the Netherlands, where he met other Dutch artists, such as Kees van Bohemen, Jan Henderikse, Armando and Jan Schoonhoven. Together with these artists, in 1958, Peeters forms the Hollandse Informele Groep (Dutch Informal Group.) The materials that Peeters selects for his works frequently have a very tactile appeal, while he simultaneously creates a certain untouchability; thus he used fire on canvases, leaving behind traces of thick smoke, or burned holes into plastic, the so-called 'pyrographies‘. With these often white works he was visually closely associated with the
German zero artists. There was also a clear relationship with nouveau realisme, another art movement going on at a similar time in France with artists such as Raymond Hains. He had a preference for modern, clean, industrial materials such as plastic and nylon, similar to the work I did last year for my exam response except rather than using colour Peeters keeps it simple.
To describe this piece to somebody who can't see it I would describe it as a canvas that has been burnt with many small holes with some slight unity but none of the holes are perfectly in line they're all slightly off balance from each other and this helps create a sense of uncertainty and untouchability that he loved creating in his pieces. This is why I feel these burn holes are so severe in there darkness is to create uncertainty but also just have a massive juxtra opposition from all the white around it.
The formal elements that have been used in this piece are; tone and texture. The way the tone is used in this piece is the stark difference from the sheer black of the burn holes and the white canvas all around these burn holes. The formal element of texture has been used in the canvas being flat and the way that canvas burns from my experience with it last year all these burn holes will be super textured and very fragile something which I could try to recreate in work to have connotations of the fragility of mental illnesses and how they consistently put you on edge. The other formal elements such as line, colour and form have been used but to a much lesser extent.
This piece of artwork is composed by the canvas being completely white and the lack of colour I believe is to connote how fragile this canvas is and perhaps this canvas itself is supposed to represent something, perhaps maybe people and wounds they'd received from World War 2 since this piece was created after it and Peeters would've lived through the second World War meaning he would've had to fight and would've seen some horrible things early on in his life. I also feel this is the reason this piece may have been created to represent how fragile we are as humans and how we are all the same with our little imperfections that make us all different and these burn marks are here to symbolise death or destruction of some kind perhaps to do with World War 2, perhaps maybe another reason much more personal to Peeters himself.
The elements I am going to be taking from Peeters' work is this sense of subtlety but also the sense that we're all the same despite us all coming from different walks of life no matter whether, you're straight, gay, bisexual, with a mental illness, living without a mental illness, we are all the same people and we're all fragile and need to help each other rather than destroying each other. This I believe is helped by the simplistic approach that Peeters uses for many different interpretations which is a similar effect I want to achieve in my work. I also love using the element of fire in my work and feel it can be one of the most powerful and most creative things to use in art which can gain such fantastic effects when used correctly but also requires slight skill because of the element of danger and uncontrollability which can be used to reflect the uncontrollability of people and their emotions.
[4]
My third artist for my personal investigation is Cornelia Parker, an artist most famous for the piece I am going to be looking at and studying the most out of her work, Cold Dark Matter (An Exploded View.) Parker was born in 1956 and studied at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design (1974–75) and Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1975–78). She received her MFA from Reading University in 1982 and honorary doctorates from the University of Wolverhampton in 2000, the University of Birmingham (2005) and the University of Gloucestershire (2008). In 1997, Cornelia Parker was shortlisted for the Turner Prize along with Christine Borland, Angela Bulloch, and Gillian Wearing the latter of three then went on to winning the prize. Parker is best known for large-scale installations such as Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) first shown at the Chisenhale Gallery in Bow, East London in which she had a garden shed blown up by the British Army and suspended the fragments as if suspending the explosion process in time. In the center was a light which cast the shadows of the wood onto the walls of the room. Parker main inspiration for doing such pieces as Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View could possibly have come from the fact that her mother was German and was in the Luftwaffe during the Second World War, and was then a prisoner of war for a couple of years after the war. Her British grandfather also fought in the trenches in the First World War so this may lead some insight into pieces such as the one I am going to be looking at.
To describe the piece to someone who can’t see it I’d describe it as a shed and you can sort of tell this by the first thing that my eye goes to in the piece which is the window which still keeps its form so it is recognisable otherwise without proper context into the piece I wouldn’t be able to tell what it is Parker has used to create this piece. I however love the idea of that by hanging the bits of the shed and placing a light in the middle of the room to make it cast all these shadows on the wall that it is almost like a snapshot of time, but at the same time it is also quite a distorted snapshot of time and another great thing about this piece is that it will never be exactly the same or be easy to replicate which means it’d be unique every time again similar to the fact that nobody’s mental illness is the same as someone else who also suffers with it and I think this would be a fantastic element to include into my work and I plan on doing this at least once and maybe develop it even further.
The formal elements that are used in this piece are line and form. The way form is used in this piece as naturally because it’s a garden shed the piece is already quite large and is made even larger by the fact that all the pieces are hanging from the ceiling and are all much more spaced out to replicate an explosion. So if I were to recreate this piece due to their being much less classroom space I’d have to do it with a much smaller household object such as a bookcase or maybe a bed. I’d also use something like a bookcase as I could make it personal to me by adding old memories and things. This would also mean I could further show the extreme juxtaposition between childhood things and the sense of innocence and the destructiveness that depression can have on a person. The formal element of line is used in the way that Parker has placed the actual bits of the shed itself as she could have had them much closer together or perhaps place them in a different way to what she originally did and intentioned to do. The formal element of line is very important in this piece also because it has to be so intricately crafted because not one area can be too overcrowded to cast just the right shadows and have the dramatic affect that Parker wanted to achieve, but it also has to look visually appealing both ways with the shadows and the actual shed itself.
The composition of the piece is despite it being an explosion each piece of the shed is intricately placed so that the piece applies to the rule of thirds with the shed window despite being off kilter directly in the centre of the piece and another. Another important thing when it comes to the composition of this piece is while every piece has been deliberately placed it needs to placed in a way that seems natural and how the shed would look in an explosion.
After doing research on Cold Dark Matter I found an interesting article by the Tate [5] where they directly spoke with Parker and gain insight into her most famous piece to quote 'The garden shed came about because I was trying to find something universal and archetypal and that we all identified with and that was familiar to us. It's not the house but it's this kind of attic-y private place at the bottom of the garden which we put all our left-over stuff in. And so it seemed like a depository rather than the place that you live.', and the article goes on to further explain about why Parker decided to display the piece suspended from the ceiling and a little insight into the name of the piece 'The whole point of suspending it is to rob it of its pathos. After it was blown up and all the objects were lying on the floor, all very distressed, they had a pathos and somehow putting it back in the air where they were a little while before, it sort of re-animates them.
The title of the piece is called 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View'. It's a two-part title really. The 'cold dark matter' I really like because obviously explosions have all kinds of connotations, dark ones being the most prominent. Also, 'cold dark matter' sounds like a psychological state - a mood or an atmosphere or a depression - I like the sound of that. It's a scientific term: it was coined to describe all the stuff in the universe you can't quantify, all the stuff they know is there but you can't see, which seemed a perfect description. And then 'an exploded view' is the kind of diagram you get in technical manuals to describe how a car works or a bike or a lawnmower, a very pragmatic laying out of stuff. And so that's what I was trying to do, to organise something that was totally beyond our control and emotional control.'
The elements I want to take from Parkers work are her use of everyday items and objects and give them new darker meanings, I particularly want to explore what she was saying when she said 'she wanted to rob the shed of its pathos' with pathos being an appeal to emotion, and is a way of convincing an audience of an argument by creating an emotional response, and this is what I want to create in my work. I want to create thought provoking pieces of work that make you stand there and self-reflect and really think deep about yourself, almost scare themselves with their own thoughts similar to how my thoughts can terrify me and make me feel so isolated and alone. That is the emotion I want to en capture in my installations this year. I want to create a fear of something that either doesn't exist or isn't there.
Biblography
[1] http://www.healthline.com/health/depression/gay
[2] Tadeusz Machowski, N/A, N/A, Mixed Media, http://www.abstractartistgallery.org/tadeusz-machowski/
[3] Henk Peeters, Pyrography #01, 1962, Smoke on plastic, http://www.arndtberlin.com/website/artist_13969?idx=p
[4] Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter (An Exploded View), 1991, exploded garden shed, https://narratingwaste.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/cornelia-parker-and-the-untimeliness-of-waste/
[5]http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/parker-cold-dark-matter-an-exploded-view-t06949/text-audio-transcript
This piece didn't work as well due to the base material being wool and when wool is burned it not only makes a horrific smell but it goes solid and crusty so if I was to use this I'd have to be careful with the amount I used in a piece as the colour's itself are very dark and overpowering which is why I'd also experiment with the very light and lacy material to show the contrast between the lightest fabric I'd bought and the heaviest.
