I outlined in my ‘statement of intent’ that I wished to investigate ‘The loving connections between people’. So far I have been concentrating on marriage as a way of ‘connecting’ couples love. I am currently researching and identifying how I am going to display and illustrate ‘love’ ‘bonds’ ‘connections’ and ‘relationships’ in my chosen medium textiles.
Textile’s is key to my projects development, it is a technique that I believe creates a visually beautiful finish to a piece, but also holds a lot of weight and historical meaning. Textile’s as a craft is mostly, still to the present day, done by female artists which influences my way of working as a female student.
For example when creating this piece ‘Trust is the foundation of a successful marriage, if there isn’t any trust then it simply can’t work.’ I considered the quote to be the importance of the piece. I thought about the connections between two people and the sanctity of marriage. Relationships from the outside can appear stable, romantic and ideal but when you look deeper sometimes it can be full of insecurities and doubt.
I see divorce as sometimes being a liberating event especially for women. When creating this piece I thought about the women’s movement and how women can find empowerment through such things as divorce. The reason I believe my piece made me consider these ideals is because of the way I created it, through the use of textiles. I really wanted this piece to contain a hidden narrative; I wanted it to appear beautiful from a distance, from the outside, but full of insecurities within the piece.
In my first discussion about my project, I talked about using cliché forms of love as a way of accessing my project, because of the hidden message in this piece, I believe the use of the cliché heart shape, and it works affectively without making the piece itself cliché.
I have also created a piece that’s essence originate form a stereotypical sign of affection, ‘flowers in a museum (esk) display’. The piece is basically a series of five flowers created out of divorce statics. I wanted, again to create something that appeared visual beautiful from a distance but contained a hidden message. Each individual flower includes different information about divorce; I have carefully chosen a word or phase from each flower and typed it on the front of the flowers display box. I have used a Dymo typer to emphasis the ides of a museum setting as I believe the typing fits with this theme. I then placed the boxes in a particular order as I believe when read it as a continuum it leaves the viewer questioning the piece as a collective and as individuals. It reads; Infidelity, Last 15, Average Female, 58 million, End.
I want this piece to contain a museum like felling, the reason for this is because I wanted the piece to question; is everlasting love, till the day we die love, a thing of the past? It seems almost too easy to have quick marriages and quick divorces; I sometimes wonder do couple get married because they know it doesn’t have to be forever; divorce almost eliminates ‘cold feet’ syndrome. To contrast this I do believe divorce is liberating and essential for some couples, it’s just got to the points in our society were marriage doesn’t hold that ‘forever after’ notion. Something to me that really highlights this it that in shops you can get ‘Congratulations on your divorce’ cards. It is all of these research points that brought me to my piece being displayed in museum (esk) boxes.
At the same time as creating this piece, I also made a wedding bouquet of flowers out of ‘fantasy film’. The bouquets of flowers are delicate and fragile, like most relationships are. When creating the bouquet I thought it looked like a group of brownie girl guides had made it, which made me think about actually getting in contact with a group of girl guides to produce a set of flowers for my project. The reason I considered this is because I have always been agitated by the concept of artists not creating their own work, but taking credit for it. An artist who I admire and have research for this project (and for my dissertation) is Tracey Emin, she famously, like a lot of the YBA’s, has a group of assistances helping create some of her pieces. I wanted to see how this fells, if it felt like my work or whether art created by a group of brownies was just that, theirs. I have recently got in contact with a guiding unit and I am going to undertake this experimental activity.
The other side to this piece was making it look more like a wedding bouquet, but with a hidden objective. Keeping with my current theme of divorce, I used pale cream ribbons and gold thread to emphasis the bouquet theme. On the cream ribbons I stitched divorce statics and quotes. Such as ‘More people today are part of a second marriage than a first’. I love the ribbons as a piece and I love the decorative colourful flowers as a piece, but as a combination it visual doesn’t work. I believe the combination of colours takes away from the essence of the text.
This is why I chose to re create the piece using a single white rose. White roses are often associated with death, and to me divorce is the death of a marriage. So far I have just experimented with a single white rose. I believe the play on the word ‘single’ is the centre of this piece as after being in a couple for ‘x’ amount of time, divorce makes a couple two separate individuals. I believe this solemn white rose contains much more of a thought process making the piece additional developed and finished.
The final piece I am going to talk about today is an ongoing piece, a piece that moves away from divorce and toward the ‘positives’ of love. This work is just developing it is something that I started initially creating but needed more research before I felt comfortable producing the piece. The piece is going to be a collective of images illustrating lines from a book I have been reading titled ‘Love letters of great men and women; Inspired by sex and the city’. I am picking out references to love that are unusual or that would create an intriguing illustration, such as ‘You turn my affections eastwards’ and ‘It is the hardest thing in the world to be in love and yet attend to business.’
I have already created these two quotes and I believe they are visual affective and the stitched imagery is fitting especially for ‘It is the hardest...’
I wish to further these images by translating some of my drawing into screen prints. I have already obtained my induction for this and have past experience with the screen printing technique. Another aspect of this collection of pieces that I am considering is how I would go about displaying them. Over the summer I visited the Quilts exhibition and saw the work of Careen Garfen, which was a blanket out of small images all sewn together.
This is one way I am considering forwarding my work, Quilts have such a historical meaning and for quotes such as ‘I shall want some linen from your house tomorrow’, I believe this method of display would be visual affective and appropriate.
Overall I believe this next step would move away from cliché symbols of love allowing me to evaluative the past works in comparison to my future developing pieces.
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