Print of breast on transparent paper with butter, partly inspired by the 'haphazard and individual methods' that Karla Black speaks of and by the performative art of Monika Weiss in which she uses her own body to create works. I decided to try using parts of my own body as a material (instead of charcoal or a pencil) along with butter to further explore the idea of what happens when you apply 'haphazard, individual techniques', to further see how the material i am working with could create the work itself. The body, especially when mixed with a substance like butter, is quite unpredictable in terms of the image that will emerge. I found interesting the kind of indents and marks the print made in the butter, as can be seen in the photo below.
I've always been interested and frustrated with representation and its limitations to tangibly portray a lived experience, and how that experience actually feels to the person to whom the experience belongs. Using the body to imprint onto a surface how I feel my body actually looks, how it feels to me to exist within, was the motivation for some of these works, and is where the idea for the butter came about- to me it seemed appropriate to use a substance that is pure fat, to put onto a surface the feeling of fat and flesh and oiliness. The feeling of fat felt more accurately represented when expressed with a material like butter. Have been inspired to use my own body as a material like Yves Klein's 'Anthropometry Series'.
Stripped bare.
I've always been interested and frustrated with representation and its limitations to tangibly portray a lived experience, and how that experience actually feels to the person to whom the experience belongs. Using the body to imprint onto a surface how I feel my body actually looks, how it feels to me to exist within, was the motivation for some of these works, and is where the idea for the butter came about- to me it seemed appropriate to use a substance that is pure fat, to put onto a surface the feeling of fat and flesh and oiliness. The feeling of fat felt more accurately represented when expressed with a material like butter. Have been inspired to use my own body as a material like Yves Klein's 'Anthropometry Series'.
Stripped bare.
Breast print on transparent paper, with butter
Charcoal anatomy drawings
charcoal and butter
pencil
charcoal and paint
Ideas for more work:
Dip body parts in paint and print onto either a sheet or large paper
Smear body with food or oily, fatty substances.. and print onto sheets/ paper
CONTAINS SLIGHT NUDITY
Below are my experiments carried on from the 'breast butter print' pictured above. I was interested in how the material (paint) looked on my body- the way it changed when applied to skin, how it flaked off, became wrinkled, etc- and how different that was from the way it looked when printed onto paper, as pictured after the body images.
Below are prints of my hand, breast and thigh- not very clear but thats what it is
NOTES:
How different i feel in my own body versus how it really is in reality, in the world. Trying to make sense of my own physical existence/ physical body, and how material is such a big part of that (my physical body, fat, flesh, weight, its appearance) yet it is also not the most important part- the unseen things (the psychological issues that create eating disorders) are immaterial. So at the moment for me its about trying to find a material that best represents this? The act of drawing around myself and making prints with my body is like a way of reassuring myself of how i actually look, as opposed to how i think i look.
No materials will ever be able to entirely express these things- my existence, my experience, this battle. The physical, tangible things are the actual food, the scales, the numbers, the measuring tape, the fat, the mass, the bones, the skin, my visible body. They can be seen, touched, consumed, felt. The realization that no material or physical thing can express inner things. Karla black- material experience over language as a way of understanding the world. The internalization of psychological anguish and turmoil and pain is invisible, it is not a physical, tangible thing, but you create it as so , through something else (the body- the loss of weight etc) with an eating disorder. The peeling away of flesh, the flaking crumbling- charcoal dust, or dried paint, becoming less of.
IDEAS:
Dip scales in charcoal dust and print, or draw around them
Print grease from foods onto paper
Draw around self on a sheet?
Lumps of butter or lard to signify loss of fat?
Something being there , and then not being there anymore- gradual disappearance.
Dry paint on self and let it flake off, flakes resembling skin, or desire for weight loss.
Dried paint on arm, flaking off
Flakes from peeled paint
Dried peeling paint on arm
Karla Black, key ideas in her art work:
pure material substance
color
physical response to the work
art- reducing it down to basic drives- its 'animal' notions
painting is the traditional way to present color, but karla wants to bring her materials up to eye level (like paintings traditionally do) the point of her work is to challenge 'the homogenous, this is a painting, this is a sculpture' thing, that you can pick up and move etc. she talks of invisibility which is akin to my own idea
video- 'karla black and structure and material'
I'm finding it hard to choose whether to work with more observational drawings with the charcoal, or to focus just on pure materials and try to pull something out of that. The concepts of subjectivity, identity, self and experience are all factors that im trying to understand more and trying to somehow portray in this work - or the final works anyway. Other ideas i have are to make tentative, sketchy drawings with faint marks of charcoal and maybe butter or watercolor, to try and further the idea of something being there just for a moment but not being able to fully represent it or embody it with mere materials, which is what i was trying to do with the butter and paint prints.
In terms of process.. i dont have a process. i haven't found one and im disappointed. ive just been making things. and a process has not been developed. i want people to have an emotional, personal response to the work obviously but also to be aware that they cant know my experience fully, like with all personal identity/ experience based work. maybe a kind of tentative, barely there approach is actually what i should go for, for the final works, and the charcoal allows me to do that- it is a contradictory material in that it is both fine and subtle and powdery, yet dense, heavy, staining. I feel like i've resigned myself to the fact that no material is really good enough to explain something mental and therefore invisible. It almost reminds me in ways of the actual physical, visible effects of disorders or various mental states, the way the results of behaviors make themselves shown, for example with anorexia, weight loss, loss of fat, becoming smaller, knuckle abrasions from bulimia, protruding veins, everything becoming thinner and sinewy- all these things are visible to the eye but they are like materials in that they can only show physicality which can only go so far in terms of peoples understanding of the lived, felt experience that is going on behind the visible things. (hopefully that makes some sort of sense).
"Traditionally a painting is sort of a window onto another world, and therefore it is an escape, but it is a kind of optical, cerebral escape. And I think the thing about sculpture is that it is completely the opposite thing. It is in the world, it absorbs you into the materials and into yourself in the physical world. And I think that that can be as much of a leap or as much of an escape or an experience. And maybe it is more real, because this is a real thing"- Karla Black.
I've been having some trouble with this idea because at first that was what i thought, or came to think, about materials during this assignment- that it would feel more 'real' because materials are physical, tangible things as opposed to say a painting that is like a 'window into another world', as Karla Black says. But i'm having so many problems with figuring out whether or not any of the materials i use are sufficient for what im trying to do or trying to say.. even though i know its meant to be just about the materials and what they say..
KARLA BLACK INTERVIEW LINK:
transferring what it feels like to actually have anorexia, onto a material. karla black said that materials feel more 'real' than any other art medium because they are physical things that are somehow close to us i guess, we are made up of materials of sorts- fat, skin, blood, organs, water, etc.
being with the materials (kind of like monika weiss does) has felt quite important to me, because even if its not actually happening and is just in my imagination, when i lie with or on top of a material- roll myself around on a large sheet of paper, print my own body onto paper, get materials on myself, it feels more like i am able to transfer certain things onto the materials. if that makes any kind of sense.
what would actually signify what it feels like to have that experience? i can show the material things that are physically present and have significance such as scales, measuring tape, actual food, knife for cutting, dettol and cotton buds, tears from a meltdown, a print out of BMI stats.
maybe i should use actual food? like mixing it all together- stuff that ive eaten, to make some sort of mixture and just place it on white paper. drawing around myself is weird because its meant to be a type of 'therapy' activity often used for body dysmorphia in eating disorder clinics (for example the renfrew clinic from the lauren greenfield documentary 'thin', where patients drew an outline of how they thought they looked, and then had someone draw around them to show their actual bodies, both which were of course quite different). its meant to, as i understand, kind of assure you and confront you with a reality of how you really look, as opposed to how you feel you look. but when i have the outline of my body drawn around and then look at it, i dont feel at all as though im looking at my 'reality'- firstly, maybe because its just so alien to see an accurate outline of your own body and secondly because it feels so beyond weird and unreal to be faced with an apparent reality of how you look when you spend all your time existing inside your head thinking and believing you look totally different, so that belief becomes reality. this is part of my problem with this assignment and the issue im having with the materials- none of them seem to be able to illustrate my reality?
Butter on folded paper
differentiating between using heavy handed, harsh lines and really pressing the charcoal onto the paper to allow the material create as much denseness as possible, and then below, using very light, sketchy lines that are barely there, and also throwing the charcoal at the paper to make scattered, unpredictable marks.
By drawing on a sheet with charcoal I again see the ways that the material determines the outcome of an image. I laid the sheet on the ground while drawing on it, and the wrinkles in the sheet caused the drawing to be both smooth and also very jerky and skittish. So with this work it was not only the material (charcoal) but also where the sheet was placed, (the concrete floor) and the sheet itself, that determined the final outcome of how this image looked.
I've been moving between observational type charcoal drawings and then working just with the materials (charcoal, butter) themselves, trying to find out which type of working suits what i want to do best. im interested in finding a material that can show, or evoke the feelings of, mental pain. so things we all feel but cannot see. im looking for something that can show invisibility, im trying to see how materials (and which materials) can do this.
NOTES:
How losing weight changes a person, they become different, almost become someone else. Why is this. How does this happen.
Things like that mirror the kind of invisibility I'm trying to find in materials, that I think is present in materiality.
Materials to me reflect and also juxtapose this kind of weird invisible thing- materials to me somehow reflect mental states, mental things that can't be seen.
What I've discovered interests me most about materials is their ability to determine or create an image, instead of me the artist determining it.
The way smearing butter smears the charcoal, gives it a new texture and look because of that texture.
Charcoal is fine, crumbly, powdery, smudgy, it stains, it always leaves marks no matter how much you try to erase, it always remains. Charcoal is a resilient, stubborn material that stays put.
Karla black is not interested in for example her not interested in her materials relationship to language or any connotations they have, but the pure material qualities. Wants the work to embody real creativity, and is interested always in bringing raw material and color up to eye level, like paintings normally would.
Subjective experience: Cannot fully describe the experience to others because it is beyond words. The prints of my body parts made with paint could be seen as hurried, mad, almost schizophrenic (?) flashes of materialization of the body/ not actually wanting to face what your body really looks like, afraid of the reality of how it really looks, so just throwing yourself at the canvas very quickly so as to just imprint the bare minimum of your physical reality onto a surface. ??
Antony Gormley's work explores a similar theme. Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live. "Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside." His work attempts to treat the body not as an object but a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical – a trace of a real event of a real body in time. (taken from Wikipedia).
the question of subjectivity in art and personal experience is drawn into focus in this work and what im trying to do, trying to discover.
is it??
ive used my body, my self, with the butter and body printing. charcoal could be used still but im not sure about it, im kind of gearing more towards butter. im trying to find a material or a process or SOMETHING that i don't know, shows ..something important about life. something about myself also, obviously- my eating disorder. my relationship to my own physicality, my own perceived reality. trying to find a material that can embody this feels impossible, so ill have to settle for something that KIND OF embodies it.
Karla Black- why bodily experience of the material world carries as much meaning as words, if not more.
"The joy and beauty of the human interaction with that (the raw creativity) gets more and more lost. This happens not only as it all gets closer to being formed into a physical object, but also as it goes through the mincer of language via explanation and instruction, and as, out of necessity, it begins to involve other people, practicality, the restrictions of space, of rules, of gravity and entropy".
"What I hope for is an impetus toward physical response. This requires a bodily response to be transformed into an optical/cerebral one".
How can I transfer this kind of thinking and idea into my own work- the use of material, not language, to understand the world. and the idea that that art when reduced is about kind of raw, animalistic drives?! i need something that transcends the observational, predictable and obvious shit im used to making. weirdly, the materials ive used all feel wrong- they all feel too small somehow, not expressive enough, just not good enough in any respect- and mainly, they all feel too PHYSICAL. i almost want to use air, or something thats not even visible..? everything i find feels too 'objecty', too mechanical, too lumpy, too physically 'fixed'.
