Project development

When I started this project I looked into using decopatch as a way of placing photographs onto an object. Although I wasn’t exactly sure at the start of how I wanted to represent this, I knew that I somehow wanted to use a mask which I had previously used within my last project.

Since researching into other sculptures that have been produced regarding the issue of mental health, I have found that using the body in some form as a sculpture is a popular way of representing mental health. I have moved on from the idea of using a mask, and instead am looking into a way of producing a 3D sculpture of a head to show the link with the invisible problem of mental health.

I also jotted down keys words and ideas that I wanted to incorporate within my work. They are as follows:

Sculpture
Layers – Different parts of my life that contribute and represent my social anxiety
Personal – Keeping the project personal to me and my own battles with mental health
Decopatch
Photographs
Childhood – The way in which my upbringing and childhood could have contributed to my mental health
Writing and quotes – Using my own writing to talk about my personal experience with social anxiety

I wanted to create something that somehow incorporated all of these different thoughts. The one that stood out to me most was layers. As somebody who suffers from social anxiety i’m not good at expressing myself to people and talking about why I suffer from social anxiety and how it makes me feel. There are lots of different things that contribute to the disorder, creating this idea of layers. Combining this with the idea of creating a sculpture based around the human body has made me think of a new idea for this project.

I am interested in creating a 3D model of the human body as previously mentioned, but almost directing it into layers. On each layer will represent a different aspect of my social anxiety. The work will incorporate both photographs and text which will be written by me. Although the project is once again very personal to me, I want the work to also be a help to those going through a similar thing and will be something that they can relate to. My next steps is to look into what the actual sculpture can be made from and to best produce the layers within the work.

Project 84 – Mark Jenkins

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Project 84 was a campaign produced by This Morning to represent male suicide. The project was created to ignite a conversation surrounding male suicide, with 84 sculptures being placed on top of studios in London. 84 men take their own life every week within the UK and each sculpture represented one of these men and their stories.

The project for me is quite shocking, especially if you were to see this in person without expecting too. However, I believe that this is needed to make people notice and talk about mental health, instead of ignoring the issue. The project was a collaboration between This Morning and the mental health charity CALM. Using both a charity and popular tv show meant that the campaign could reach a wider audience, something that is important to think about when thinking about how my work can reach a specific audience.

The work not only included the sculptures, but a website in which 84 men who have died from suicide were named, with some going as far to share their stories. Adding this personal touch to the work makes the sculptures and their stories a lot more realistic and harder as a viewer to deal with. I want to incorporate a form of writing and personal experiences within my work, giving a real life insight into what it is like to suffer with social anxiety.

Head Above Water – Steuart Padwick

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In 2018 a sculpture was put up on London’s South Bank, to represent mental health. Although the sculpture is 9 metres high and I do not aim to produce something to this scale, the concept behind it is important to me.

Stewart Padwick, its creator, said ‘It stands as a symbol of hope, bravery, compassion, positivity and change, for those who have come through or are still confronting mental health issues, and the people who support them’. He went onto talk about how so many people have demons and battles.

The work is about humanity and the care for others, with the scale of work forcing people to take notice. When I produced my last project, the work was very personal to me and in no way did I want the work to ‘speak’ to others. I produced the work for a selfish reason – for self help more than producing art for the public. However, with this project I am looking at changing my audience. I aim to look into ways that the work will reach those suffering from mental health, as something they can relate to. This sculpture in particular projects a very positive message and is more about recovery than the negative representation of mental health that we often see.

The sculpture was lit up at night, changing colours to reflect how people were feeling through a live twitter feed. For example if you were feeling down the whole sculpture would turn black, making people think. On the other hand if the sculpture was to turn yellow then the effect of people would be more positive. This type of interactiveness is something that also appeals to me, changing the way we think about art. In a gallery space for example, we may be used to simply standing and admiring art, but not being allowed to touch. I want to create something that people can touch and use, making the work more of an installation piece.

Stages of Depression – Zoe Johnson

The work produced by Zoe Johnson is to make people aware of the stigma surrounding mental health. Each piece of work is made to be viewed in a silent situation – making the viewers feel uncomfortable. This allows the viewer to experience how mental health sufferers feel when stigmatised. The idea of viewing the work is silence is especially important to the work. Not only does it make the viewer feel uncomfortable, but highlights the silence of the sculputres – representing how mental health sufferers often suffer in silence. Johnson, through her work, shows different ways in which people can feel when suffering from a mental illness, specifically depression.

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5bd1b526059669.5634efa858ba8 The first stage that Johnson represents within her work is Guilt. The guilt of having a mental illness, especially if you do not have a necessarily have a reason. The flesh like colours used within the work gives a feeling of rawness, representing how mental illness can have such a painful effect on the sufferer.

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f1e00a26059669.5634efa881e98 The second stage represented is emptiness. This shows both the physical and emotional feeling of emptiness. There is a link within this piece of work to eating disorders, yet the feeling of loneliness is common across all mental illnesses. This stage is especially relatable to me as I suffer from social anxiety. I often feel lonely, yet because of my disorder I find it hard to socialise – creating an endless problem I cannot seem to recover from.

The third stage represented is exhaustion. Suffering from a mental illness means you can constantly feeling exhausted. It is interesting for me how only part of the body is used within this work – the rest appearing to be ‘missing’. This links with the feeling of being unable to function which is talked about in the next stage.

dc5dea26059669.5634efa86845e The fourth step is the feeling of slipping. With any mental illness you can feel as if you do not have the ability to function any longer. As the artist describes it is like coming closer to death. Every aspect of your life is effected when suffering from a mental illness, not simply your thoughts.

8071ea26059669.5634efa86bbce.jpeg Finally is the idea of being pulled up – the idea of recovering. This is an important message to me to get across. The help of other people has such a massive impact on those recovering from mental illness. The work is different from the others in the project. Where the rest of the work can be seen in quite a negative way, this plays on the idea of hope at the end of a mental illness.

Don’t let me explode – Frank L Tybush

Sculpture is something that I personally haven’t experimented with myself, and therefore wanted to look into other sculptures that have been regarding mental health.

‘Don’t let me explode’

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The work produced by Frank L Tybush was produced to show the ways that people cope with depression. The three sculptures are individually named ‘The cutter’, ‘The purger’ and ‘The Puncher’.

What drew me to this work was the use of ‘people’, something that I want to use in my work. Mental health is such a personal issue that the idea of using the human body as a way to represent a message feels best suited to me. The work also shows how many different ways there are to cope with a mental illness – showing how mental illness is a complex issue and needs to be understood more deeply.

I am also intrigued by the way the sculptures have been made without any detail on their face. This gives them a sense of wanting to be hidden – the same way somebody may feel when suffering with a mental disorder. This links with my previous module where I did not show my face within self portraits, leading me to introduce a mask that became a representation of how I mask my true self.

Group Experimentation

Mask Within my other module – research and context – we were told to bring an object that helped us work in a creative way. I decided to bring the mask that I had used within my previous module, which was used for my self portraiture work.

We worked with other people in the group – fine artists and illustration students- to create a piece of art using the different materials everybody had bought with them. We covered the mask with tissue paper and bark from trees to create a surreal piece of artwork.

I found the process of producing this art work interesting for a number of reasons:

I find my work is progressing into more fine art photography, and find that working the the fine art students has influenced this. It was great to work with them for a short time, not only seeing how they work, but understanding their thought process a lot more.
I’m looking into covering different objects with either paper or other materials and found this the perfect oppurtunity to practice. It was intersting to see how different materials stuck and worked with the mask where others didn’t. It was also interesting using bark as a material because it introduced the idea of nature into the work. Within my last projects I combined self portraits with landscape pictures, which was something I had never considered before, and is something I would like to carry on experimenting with.

Practicing Decopatch

The idea of decopatch is something I have wanted to experiment with for a while, and I felt this module was the perfect opportunity to begin to do this. As I have never actually created anything using the method before, I began covering a mask, which was the theme within my last project.

I used paper with two different designs on them, tearing them into smaller pieces and sticking them down, slightly overlapping each one. The paper was surprisingly easy to work with, especially on raised parts. If I continue to use this method, I would want to use photographs instead of patterned paper. It would also need to be easy to work with, not changing the appearance of the image.

Below are the final results from my first time experimenting with decopatch:

Materials

I roughly experimented with different materials, seeing what would work best when covering a surface.

Magazines – Not only was it the easiest material to work with out of the three materials I used, but I wanted to see how using purely writing would look. For this module I want to experiment with the idea of using writing – especially hand writing – with photography. The only issue I found is that the words were at risk of running if mixed with the glue to much.

Material – Although the idea of using material initially appealed to me, I found that it was the worst option. When overlapping the material – which is the main technique used within decopatch – it didn’t give an aesthetically appealing finish. The glue also made the material go slightly see through, again resulting in a messy look.

Paper- Although using patterned paper was most similar to actual despatch paper, it was a lot thicker which made it difficult to use when covering bumps. However, it worked well with the glue, not running at all and sticking to the surface better than the others.

Proposal – Interrogating Practice

After completing the establishing practice module, I am beginning to understand more the type of photographer that I want to be. One of the main reasons for doing a MA course was to find out what sort of photographer I want to be, and I now realise that fine art photography is something that really appeals to me. Overall I was happy with the work I produced for establishing practice and want to stick with the theme of mental health, especially the link to my own issues. However, I want to consider how I present a final piece of work. I feel that instead of just simply handing in prints or a book like I did with the previous module, I want to consider how I can present work in a more creative way.

The idea of installation art and sculptures is something that has always appealed to me. For this module, I aim to create ‘an object’ rather than just prints, which incorporate photography as well as other skills that I intend to develop. Decopatch is something that I have wanted to learn for a while now, and I feel that this is the perfect project to begin this. Decopatch is the process of decorating an object by covering it in coloured paper and textures. Instead of using patterned paper which is what Decopatch normally involves, I want to consider ways of using photographs instead to cover an object.

One of the things that stood out for me in my last project was the anonymity within the work. I unintentionally started the module photographing myself without showing my face. This theme continued and I ended up naming the book ‘Behind the mask’. The idea of using a mask is something I want to include within the new module. Something that I also began experimenting with was the use of text a long with photographs. Although I have always been into writing, I have never used it with my images. This is something that I want to experiment with a lot more within the project, being one of the main aspects of the work.

When producing images, I technically keep the set up simple, using natural light and my surroundings to produce a photograph rather than equipment. This is something that I want to carry on with, however I would like to practice using higher end cameras. At the moment, I use my own Canon 60D but feel with the work I want to produce I would like to experiment using cameras such as Canon 5D or 7D.