The Good the bad and the ugly. Personal work.: July 2014

Fertile World

Here are (a recap for those who have followed this blog for a while) some of my favourite conceptually motivated university projects. I blogged about most of these projects when they were in the early working stages and if you would like to see those early experiments please feel free to look back through the posts here.

www.sammisparke.com

Fertile World

The series focuses on female vulnerability in the months of pregnancy.

Helen’s pregnant self is mirrored in the backdrop of the cornfield, which is ripe and nearing fruition in its last weeks before harvesting. This abundant and happy image actually hides a darker side.

Helen's pregnancy has been complicated. The stormy sky alludes to the stormy ride

that has been, and continues to be, her pregnancy; an ominous threat with an unpredictable outcome.

Surrealist Work

In the final year of my degree my work began to move in a Surrealist direction. This was partly influenced by the research I conducted while writing my dissertation, 'How did Surrealism help cultivate some of the most important female artists/photographers of the early twentieth century?'

However, this Surrealist aesthetic continues still to influence and inspire my work. It is a style I am very interested in borrowing from in future projects.

The work here was produced at the beginning of the Object to Subject series which was a key 3rd year project. You can see this work is surrealist in style yet the project Object to Subject was not. This is because as the Object to Subject work progressed the surrealist aesthetic i'd been working with no longer seemed suited to the concept and actually interfered with a clear reading of the works in which I was trying to convey emotion and illicit feelings of ‘empathy’ in the viewer.

So here are the first works from that lengthy project which I still adore and am actually quite proud of.

No Man's Land

No Man’s Land

No Man’s Land is a conceptual project that attempts to capture some of the isolation and confusion unique to the teenage years, which many people will have experienced and can relate to.

In the series I hoped to touch upon the confusion and loneliness associated with being neither a child nor adult and how this existence is a kin to a transient state with no real point of reference. The subject of the series is Natalia, a 13 year old teenager from Poland, living in the UK. She was a perfect subject due to her age and social circumstance. The difficult changes all teenagers go through can be seen as magnified in Natalia who is not only coping with emotional and physical changes of the teenage years but with the added confusion of identity; being a Polish girl in the UK.

The changeable and transient nature of teenage-hood, and Natalia’s personal experience, is emphasised by the use of visual devices including lighting and camera angle. The choice of backdrop or landscape was also very important to the series. Natalia’s playfulness, awkwardness and sometimes loneliness was reflected in these changeable backdrops, which included the sea and tides as well as the seasons and nature.

Object to Subject

Object to Subject is rooted in theories of the ‘the gaze’.

I began by exploring mechanisms that act to disrupt a straightforward sexual reading of the female nude. After much research and experimentation I came upon the idea of emotion (the nude expressing strong and recognisable emotions) as a means of subverting a sexual reading of my model. The theory plays out that when the viewer sees an emotion in a stranger, an emotion they recognise, empathy takes place. In this case, after empathy is elicited, viewers who were once inclined to view the nude as a sexual object are much more inclined to view her as a subject or personality. The relationship between viewer and nude is fundamentally changed as the nude morphs in the mind of the viewer from object to subject.

The images use the backdrop of the home as a stage to position this narrative of emotion. Each of the images portrays a different emotion, however certain emotions may be interpreted differently by individual viewers as sometimes happens in life. The images are loosely sequential and if read as they are numbered will hopefully convey a story of emotion. In addition to this camera angles were used deliberately to enhance the impact of the emotions conveyed.