I had a tutorial this week with my tutor. They suggested I look at Joel-Peter Witkin as a possible artitst I could be interested in. He takes photos of body parts and whilst they are pretty gruesome, they have the same kind of vibe as my prints. I really like he poses the body parts with typical still life objects such as flowers or food. The juxtaposition of these objects almost normalises the more gruesome aspects of the photos.
Another thing my tutor mentioned was the fact that whilst my prints are good as stand alone images, they don't work together to create a narrative. I'll admit that when I create an image, I don't really plan out what its going to be meticulously. The idea kind of comes to me and I try my best to recreate it. Its not usually till afterwards that I start to apply meaning to what I have created because I take such a hollistic approach to making these images. However, I do see what my tutor is saying. There isn't really a unifying theme with my images other than the style and the reocurring figures in the background. With the covid images I made, they made sense as they were all related to each other because of the circumstances. It's a shame that I'm not as fussed with covid anymore as it gave me some good material to work with when it first happened. Oh well, its something to think about.
My next stone that I've been working on is a picture of a baby with spiders all over it. I got the idea from a print by Paula Rego from her nursery rhyme series. Over christmas, I was given a book of these prints from my mum and I've taken to looking through them and making notes next to the images. Her Little Miss Muffet prints struck me particularly because I've toyed with the idea of using a spider with a human face before. Seeing this print gave me the urge to make it reality. In the book, it talks about how the spider is representive of a mother figure. I had encountered this concept a while back when I was studying Louise Bourgeois for A Level. I think this is partly why I used a baby because I wanted to contrast this idea of abandonment with being smothered. Originally I was going to just use one big spider, but I asked my flatmate (who has very, very, bad arachnaphobia) if one big spider or lots of little spiders was scarier and he thought that the little ones were worse. I'm inclined to agree with him. I think its more unsettling because you dont see all of them at first. I quite enjoy getting the viewers of my prints to play Where's Wally with them.
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