During semester one I researched people’s perceptions of the area they live in and attempted to break traditional British stereotypes through my work. I think one of the biggest things I learnt on semester one was how we can use materials to trick our perceptions. This semester I continued to reflect upon the idea of perceptions mainly focusing on the people and perceptions surrounding me
I am questioning what it is that makes people feel uncomfortable. I aimed to explore this idea using materials, colours and sounds to discover which has the biggest effect on the audience. I experiment with whether a grotesque object can ever be perceived as ‘beautiful’ by changing the aesthetic quality and materials of the objects or, whether something classed as ‘beautiful’ could ever not be beautiful. I have developed an interest in peoples instinctive reactions to objects and understanding of irrational fears and phobias. Studying the philosopher Nietzsche I became fascinated by his understanding to accept the balance between Apollonian and Dionysian in our lives. This suggests that we cannot exist in a purely Apollonian world centred around rationality, self-discipline and order. We must accept that it is imbedded in our human nature to be Dionysian: spontaneous, emotional and appreciate sensual pleasures. This understanding lad me to question how emotional responses can take over our rational minds.
After reflecting on my haptic paintings and the uneasy feeling I got from just listening to the sounds of my surroundings it inspired me to look at more places that I frequently visit and feel comfortable in and experiment with ways that I can use these places to change the way the audience will perceive them.
I decided to create a video of London as it is somewhere that I frequently visit and a city in which I feel very comfortable. I filmed my day with a small digital camcorder. I wanted to create a video like Laure Provost, she uses a similar quality camera which causes a more haptic response to the area. The clips she uses appear to be spontaneous and organic. After filming when I looked back on the videos that I had recorded each clip on their own is not uncomfortable as you can usually hear my voice in the back ground or they flash to an image of the friends I went to London with yet, when spliced together in a particular way they create a whole new understanding of my day, one that makes the viewer feel very unsettled and anxious. I find this very interesting as I think it is strange how rearranging footage can completely transform the effect it has on the viewer.The flashing images and the quick transitions keep the viewer engaged and cause a tense feeling, all of the sound in the video is also recorded from the day yet some is reversed, slowed down or repeated to unsettle the viewer. There is a section where I repeated the sound from a lift saying ‘going up’ this worked really well and it causes a stressful feeling for the audience watching.
After filming the video in London, I thought more about visceral art. The Huntarian gallery made me more aware of the impact visceral has on the viewer. Isaac Monte is an artist who attempts to change perceptions by altering the aesthetics of pigs hearts. His aim was to make the grotesque beautiful. I attempted to challenge this idea by using Montes concept to transform organs that I bought from a butcher in to what I would consider beautiful and unrecognisable objects. By changing visceral objects into something beautiful I hoped to understand what it was that we don’t like about organs and flesh is it the colour, the shape or simply the knowledge of what they are and where they come from. I wanted the video to seem surreal in order to completely change the way that we look at the objects being used, I aimed to make the video a gradual progression from grotesque to beautiful. produced I came to the conclusion that no matter how you try to portray the objects that are seen as visceral they will always remain uncomfortable and vulgar to the majority of the audience. There appears to be something instinctive that makes just the knowledge of the objects existence unsettling.
After reflecting upon the video that I created and the work of Isaac monte I realised that visceral objects will always remain visceral no matter how much we try to conceal them. This lead me to want to try and recreate visceral objects in new materials to see if it is simply the material of the visceral objects that makes people fear them or in fact the shape of them. I want to understand how people can fear materials that are around them all of the time. Can people still fear an object if it is not really that object?
I made a series of collages in response to the artists that I had researched such as Hannah Hoch and John Stezaker and the videos that I made. I wanted to use the ideas of rearrangement to change how we view the images. The videos were successful and I liked how rearrangement of clips could change the perception of the area so I wondered whether I could do this in a material form.
This video was a reaction to the collages that I had made. I wanted to highlight the visceral parts of the body. These are areas that we see every day in the media and in social life yet when listened to carefully and seen up close and out of context they become unusual and uncomfortable to watch This video was interesting to film as I hated looking at isolated parts of my body, again this indicated that there is something visceral about the movement of skin and flesh. By enhancing the sounds to be the main focus it heightens our awareness of the body. Even the pale colours of the skin when combined with one another become very grotesque and unappealing to the viewer. Perhaps this is an influence of the media on how our bodies ‘should’ be, or perhaps just myself being self-critical. I used parts of the body that I least like; the mouth, eyes and stomach are areas that can be used to make me personally feel most uncomfortable. I think that the process of making this video is what struck me the most as it showed how uncomfortable I was to be on the camera, which is the first time during this project so far that I have felt uncomfortable. Normally I am in control of how I want others to feel however, this time I couldn’t control my feelings towards it and even watching it back makes me cringe every time.
All the work that I have been producing to do with the idea of the visceral, it made me more aware of the fears that people have. Some of the people who viewed my videos and work really did not like it purely because if made them feel too uncomfortable. The idea that some people are afraid of something that others aren’t fascinates me. This irrational fear made me want to experiment with peoples phobias, to question what it means to have an irrational fear and what people are afraid of and where that fear has come from. The most common fear among my peers was clowns, this could be because of the clown sightings that were happening in America and the Uk late last year.
Following on with the idea of phobias from the work I did with clowns I found that another common phobia that people I asked had was insects and the idea of being trapped in a small space. When I was growing up I was strangely obsessed with insects, especially butterflies which I would catch and observe, I had a display of hundreds of dead butterflies in my bedroom and could never understand when my friends didn't want to touch them! It was this memory that informed my next outcome. To me being caught in a net with hundreds of butterflies is not a scary thought, but to lots of other people it is a terrifying concept. I created a cage that resembles a net and used paint to help block out the surroundings. inside I attached lots of dead butterflies. I then invited people to come and stand inside the cage, they didn't need to touch anything and there was no risk of the butterflies touching them yet still most people refused to get inside. I made a sound recording of insects and gave some of the people headphones with this recording and they all said that the found it harder o be inside with the sound of insects playing. This shows that sound has a large role to play on our perceptions. It was interesting how a place that to me is relaxing and beautiful yet to other people it is like a nightmare.
With all the work that I have produced, the idea of irrational fears stands out to me most. The fact that a person can be terrified of something that someone else finds pleasurable is a fascinating thought. For lots of people the idea of fear is strangely enjoyable, we are drawn to watch horror films, enjoy scaring other people and often take part in extreme sports. Therefore, I wanted to translate this pleasure of fear into my work and remind people about the most bizarre and irrational phobias that exist which can be hard for most to understand.
The report ‘Where are all the fearful children?’ explains that exposure is one of the best ways to recover from a phobia, therefore I aimed to allow people to be exposed to their phobias in a fun and interesting way.
This is what prompted the idea for the mini nets.
