FINAL OUTCOME & EVALUATION

TITLE: ‘INTERIOR/EXTERIOR’

For this project, I wanted to explore using a range of different medias, materials and processes but taking some direction forward from previous projects. I wanted to produce a piece of work that people and the audience could respond to personally or relate to through the theme of the project. I think having an impactive and interactive piece of work makes the artwork interesting in terms of seeing how people would respond to whatever it is they’re looking at.

To achieve the interactive involvement despite the pandemic preventing people to be physically interactive with the work, I wanted people to think about what I have produced and what it could be trying to express. So bringing in that interactive quality by making a piece of work that the audience could consider and see themselves apart of. That is why I decided on choosing the theme ‘fear’ to direct me forward in the project. I looked into what fear could represent and what it could be visually displayed as, and I wanted to look at what the effects it had on people.

So I looked into some artist that have used fear as a theme in their own artworks and that’s how Louise Bourgeois came to be my artist influence in the project. Louise Bourgeois had used her experiences of her fear and transformed them into domestic like pieces of work, creating room like set ups and a series of textual pieces which used to be her lived in domestic objects growing up. From there onwards, I liked the idea of using domestic like materials such as fabrics, and try to capture the theme of fear within them and transform that then into a domestic object of my own, a blanket.

When I think about fear and blankets, the association would be the problem and solution. As a child myself, my bed and blanket would be like a safe heaven back then. If I was scared of the dark, I would encase myself in my quilts and blankets to protect and comfort me from whatever it was I was so afraid of. However, now that I am a grown adult now, my view is that my blanket is comforting, but it doesn’t completely dissipate my fears or anxiety. Therefore, in my development stages, I thought calico would be a good material to use because it has its fabric qualities, but it isn’t the most comforting material. So I liked having the idea of using something where its purpose is to comfort, like a blanket, but is off putting because it doesn’t feel right.

In my proposal, I mentioned at wanting to look into textures of materials and media, and exploring ways of which I could experiment with them and present them. So I played around with fabrics and medias like paint, charcoal, chalk and pencil to see where the experimentation would take me, and that’s how I ended up deciding to use acrylic and calico as my driven material for this project. Given the idea that I wanted to make a comfort like object of something with qualities of it at least, I needed to think how I could progress those thoughts further. And that’s when I decided to explore with portraiture, fabrics and mixed medias and tried to combine those materials with the theme of fear.

At this stage where I decided on exploring with portraiture and fear, I wanted to gather examples of people’s fear so I could try and draw that into portraiture. So I asked on my social media examples of my followers fears, but decided on keeping them anonymous. Once I had these fears written out, I decided to draw figurative portraits of people that don’t actually exist, they are imaginative and completely random human characters. I liked the idea to keep the portraits simple, because if I were to draw portraits based on real personas I felt like that would take away the idea that anybody could see themselves in aspects to the work. I felt that if I were to do that, then the fear would only be subjective to those I’ve drawn.

Through the development of the portraits, I came to realise that I liked the idea of making the figure similar in aspects that they were all sketched using the same template, but each portrait came out a little different to the last which I found really interesting because I was practically drawing them all the same, so even though they are not real people, they are still their own character in a small sense because it wasn’t intentional to do that.

I eventually found a method of making portraits in a scale and pattern that I liked and thought could look effective, centring the portrait around unidentified markings that are supposed to represent how fear surrounds us when faced with our fears. I decided on using a bold colour such as black because the colour contrasted well with the off white colour of calico, and because of the portraits form, it made the surroundings of the portrait seem powerful, which is what I’m trying to visually express with how fear effects people and how it can make one feel. I kept producing more of the portraits and that when using multiples entered the idea of things, and that worked well because making a blanket with multiple portraits could work. The production of making the blanket were interesting and time consuming because everything was hand drawn, cut and painted, except from when it came to sewing the blanket together.

I think in terms of pushing the idea further, If I had the space I would have liked to maybe make a room surrounded with tapestries and blankets to create an overwhelming feeling, that could feel good or bad depending on the person viewing the work. That would put people right into the centre of the work and recreate that surrounding atmosphere of having a huge blanket of sort around you but also having the awareness that in circumstances, that’s how fear is felt to some people. I think that if I was able to use the workshops too, print work would be interesting to use because of the element of using repetitive patterns and portraits, that is something I would have liked to experiment with in this project.

But overall, I really enjoyed the process of the amount of work I was creating throughout the project, It is just a shame I was limited to the confiding space of my room. But even then, using my room to my advantage too is what’s interesting because my room is my comfort zone when I’m making a piece of work based on the opposite to comfort.