Part 3, project 3 – contextual focus, relationship with materiality

We’re asked here to think about materiality, a word I’ve only recently come to terms with, and to consider Lange-Berndt’s question about what it means to give agency to material, to follow it and act with it [see reference below]. My initial response is to reject the idea that I give agency to my materials. I choose them after all so I make the first choice as to which class of medium is going to go on stage, as it were. But that isn’t the whole story because I have discovered that, exactly as with writing, while I may have … Continue reading Part 3, project 3 – contextual focus, relationship with materiality

Part 3, project 2, becoming an image

Research point 2: Boo Ritson, Rachel Russell. Boo Ritson: my first feeling about these images (and what are they? sculptures, paintings, paintings of sculptures?) is a slight revulsion. They look dead but they also look strange and it occurs to me that they fall into that uncanny valley whereby something purportedly a human proxy, is too real to be a proxy but just misses being real. The idea that Ritson uses the sitter – body, hair, clothing – in her work gives me the creeps. Boo Ritson | Artnet Rachel Russell: is this her in the – what is it, … Continue reading Part 3, project 2, becoming an image