Presenting my work

I wanted to present my work in the most elegant way possible but this is very hard when it comes to something as delicate and detailed as my resin cups. I was thinking of presenting them on an old table with a tole of mirror underneath them. I wanted them to be the focal point as I felt they were my best work.

I bought 2 bell jars and a few tiles of mirror but i'm still trying to decide what to do with them. I want to use the bell jars as i think they will  really fit in as a whole but I don't want to over shadow the resin molds.

My 2nd Photoshoot

This week, I got Pat to fill my china cups with resin and I put stuff like Craw claws, fish scales and a dead moth in them for my end of year piece. They turned out really well and gave the exact kind of feel   I wanted. Next to the boxes of crab claws and resin I think it looks like the polar opposite in a china cup. I think it gives my pieces a more well rounded look and shows that the 'Archival' quality to my work is not exactly the point.

I also staged my photo shoot with Arlene again like I had planned with the deer head pieces and the deer makeup in the old Magdalene bathrooms. I made more deer skulls and spray painted them. I them chose her clothing and spent ages doing her makeup to make it look deer like. I got a piece of lace and put it to her face and them sponged on white face paint  when i peeled off the lace the white dots were left to look like a baby deer, which is what the skull is.

These are the photos:

Preparing for end of semester!

I've decided that instead of trying to cram tons of work in over the last 2 weeks that we have in college, I'm going to work on presenting it and setting it all up for the assessment.  I went down to the material store and got a plinth made for my resin blocks to line up. I asked the technicians to make me a closed off box that I could spray paint white.

I went to silks and charity shops to find old tea cups and china cup, I also wanted to find old boxes i could spray paint and display my objects in them as the ones I made were really shabby.
I got 5 china mugs and saucers for 5 euro and 2 old boxes that i spray painted white.
I have been gluing my wax sticks , and head pieces to spray painted boards and gluing my craw claws to a white board so I could hang it on the wall.

I have been slowly but surely getting everything together for the assessment.

Editing my Deer head piece photos and planning my next photoshoot

All in all I took about 175 shots and chose 15 which were up to scratch. I went into Pixlr online to see what they would look like if i edited them. I saturated them so they would look less colored and more icy toned, and chose some of the hats to be the only pop of color.

I'm really happy with the way these turned out, I think they look really cool!

For my next photo shoot i'm going to take Arlene and do her hair and makeup again but make her makeup more like a deer and bring her down to the old Magdeline Laundries bathrooms under the college. I think this will make for a really interesting shoot and make the head pieces seem very out of context which is what I want.

I also plan to bring a few friends out into a forest and put my colored head pieces on them. Dress them all in black and get them to pose for me. I think that this will make for a really interesting photo shoot  It will almost look like a heard of deer in the woods.

Making my Deer moulds into hats!

I've been interested for a while of turning my deer casks into hats, or head piecing as I've been looking alto at Isabella blow and Philip Treacy.

I love Isabella blows work with the lobster and the deer antler type head pieces so I thought it would be interesting if i did my own.


Isabella Blow




Isabella Blow



Isbella Blow



So to do this, i asked my friend Arlene if she would model for me in our preliminary photographs, just so I could get an idea of what they would look like.

We spent the afternoon doing her hair, backcombing it and pining it so the hair pieces would stick and then giving her very dark and sultry makeup.
I chose the head pieces I wanted to use in the bright colors like grey, pink , black and white and directed her how to pose. I then placed the head pieces in her hair and photographed them with a black background.I didn't have a lightbox so I tried to change the lighting by getting a desk lamp and bringing it from behind and in front of the corner we were working on.It seemed to work well for what i was going for.

My Resin Teasups

I really love my resin tea cups, they came out even better than I had hoped for. For some reason putting the, in the porcelin cups made the resin so cleat and shiny. Whatever I put in them just glowed.

More Teacups and Research

While I was getting my tea cups filled with clear resin, I decided to do a bit more research on artists who used found objects and parts of animals and I came across Polly Morgan. Her most famous work ''Endless Pain'' Was a show about the cycle of life and death. She wanted to created spaces within hollowed out bodies. She is well known for her taxidermy pieces and endless pain was no different.

“My new work is about a corruption of nature. It’s not things as they would happen; birds don’t eat mushrooms, pigs don’t suckle trees, octopuses don’t inhabit dead fox carcasses, generally, but I wanted to do a perverse representation of nature. But I don’t think I've pushed it to the realm of fantasy and it’s almost believable.”

Her work is mostly with little flightless birds, almost representing abortion, called 'still birth'. A dead chick with only a helium balloon to keep it floating , not flying. I personally love her work. I think It relates very much to my work as I deal with the bones of dead animals just in different ways. Instead of highlighting the death of the animal I try to change it into something beautiful. But the strange thing is her work is incredibly beautiful!

Teacup

I started looking at the way I was presenting my work, I liked how it was very archival but that wasn't exactly what I was trying to say with my work . So I started to think about the opposite of the way if  was presenting it . I went through many things like old medicine bottles,similar to Damien Hirst in 'Pharmacy' and the objects falling out of them. Then somehow I came to tea cups and china cups and it all seemed to fit into place. I went to a charity shop and got china cups and saucers in a set. I then glued the the saucers to the cups, I put my different pieces of crab and prawns.

I was researching artists like Robert Lazzarini who warped a tea cup and saucer to confuse peoples view of perception. I was also looking  Meret Oppenheim who covered a tea cup in hair and made it very impractical. 

I was trying to find a relation to my work in these artists, seeing how they developed their ideas and how they got to where they were. I wanted to create something that fitted together as a whole but were perfect separate also. I thought the teacup fitted this description.

Damien Hirst 'Pharmacy'

Robert Lazzarini

Meret Oppenheim

Research Week

After my progress review I was quite happy with the way it went and was unsure and a bit hesitant on where to take my idea next. So I decided to research artists that's were doing similar things to me to get some ideas. I was researching Berlinde De Bruyekere and really thought that her wax rendering of the human skin was similar to what i was doing. Also her use of deer's and deer antler is very similar to what i was doing.
she also uses horse skin and hair, though  since the early 1990s many of her major works have featured structures involving blankets. Their use is symbolic both of warmth and shelter, and of the vulnerable circumstances such as wars that make people seek such shelter.
Her well-known sculpture melds organic forms with the figure and the strain or inhibition of the respective components. She is an activist at heart. Almost showing the cruelty to animals in her work. When asked about her rendering of the human body she said '' I use it because it's an extension, like you extend the intestines and it's fleshy and big and hard at the same time. There could be nothing from the human body inside yet it's talking about human feelings. It's not that I really need the body to tell you something about the human condition. I do it very often with horses.''

Here are some examples of her work: