Finding Inspiration

For this last project of my degree I have been trying to figure out a way to practice my work and marry them with my interests and what it is that I want my work to say. The biggest struggle has been that I am interested in everything and I like to work with everything. This I know makes my work confusing and blurs the outlines of what it is I am trying to produce and can be confusing for the viewer. My interest in mixed mediums and play has sometimes ended up being counterproductive and leaves me frustrated. The use of photographic images, machine and hand stitching and collage feature in most of my work but sometimes the medium is not representative of the message I am trying to portray. To kick start my project in January I investigated how other people viewed the words ‘Beauty and civilisation ’. These two words was something that I came across a lot when analysing imagery during my research for my journal. The writer John Berger mentioned them as being a different truth for every viewer in his book ‘ Ways of seeing’ and I found this an area of interest. I attempted through a questionnaire, asking people to write down their thoughts and feeling of these words and then with the information provided I illustrated them with various mediums. This exercise helped me to understand relating words and imagery together and I have collated these finding in two sketchbooks. Along side this I have been investigating other artists whose work I find connects to this interest of relating the imagery and the text. The research led me to the works of Artists Joseph Cornell and Hannelore Barron. Both of these Artists use the approach of wooden boxes to encapsulate their thoughts and feeling about their chosen subjects.  Their work has helped me decipher a way of collecting these interests and rehousing them with found imagery, objects, fabrics and the relating story. Through this practice my work is now focusing on one area of memories. I discovered when asking people to relate to the words beauty and civilisation I was triggering memories and feeling for people. People started to give me memento’s of their lives or from loved ones and I want to use these objects to encapsulate their generosity and memories.