Sound and Space (back to the drawing board)

After revisiting the various notes, sketches and studies I have done over the past 3 weeks, I have decided to go focus on what I believe to be my strongest concept for this brief. Essentially, this is a study of how sound can affect how humans experience space. While I will be working with sound, other senses will also come into play here, such as smell and touch as methods of reducing or increasing how we perceive space.

Pretentious rambling over, I am basically going to go back to the drawing board with this idea. While I feel that it is a solid idea, I think I may have approached the idea the wrong way. I am going to use the notes I have already done as reference for my new approach.

I'm going to break my studies into areas and develop each individually at this stage (as listed in the handout)

• Space
• Shape
• Time
• Occupation
• Interaction
• Movement
• Scale
• Noise
• Internal/External
• Manmade/Organic

 

 

Development after one to one meeting with tutor

After meeting with my tutor, and taking the areas we discussed on board, I have decided to go back to my original idea and develop it fully before moving on. This way, I can investigate all aspects of this concept fully, rather than have a number of half developed ideas.
My tutor has advised me to research the Gestalt Theory and this will be my first step in my new approach to my original concept. I am going to build on my original concepts fully before I move on.

Stop Motion Practice: My mess can move

 While going through some of my old sketchbooks from secondary school, I saw some (very crude) workings for a stop motion/claymation video that I worked on in 4th year.
I always found this interesting and I began considering how I could include a stop motion piece into my previous ideas. This is just a quick experiment (took around 5 or 10 minutes) to see if I was actually able to do it properly.
While this is very rushed and rough, I think that it was a positive bit of practice.

Practical work #2: The human body is only a container?

Once again, I spent a little bit time experimenting with cling film and masking tape but this time it was to create a cast of my leg. This time it was not as effective as it was difficult to cover the area evenly so when I was removing it, it would hold its shape. This became clear once I had it half removed and the knee area began to lift and peel, causing it to bend and distort the entire shape.

After finishing and examining the end result, I began to consider ways to prevent the problems that occurred, and improve the overall structure. Firstly, doing it on my own leg made things unnecessarily difficult and moving was awkward and caused the cling film to slip and move, changing the shape dramatically. Secondly, doing the entire leg as a whole piece created problems when removing and trying to reshape, so doing it in sections and connecting once each piece is removed and shaped seems more logical.

Practical work: The human body is only a container?

I started by covering my left hand in cling film. Once I had every piece of skin covered with at least two layers I began to add strips of masking tape, gradually building up until the outside was relatively solid.

Using a scissors, I slowly cut a line down my wrist and into the palm of my hand. I had to cut into the middle finger to be able to free my hand. Once my hand was removed I had to reshape the masking tape hand again and cover over the cut, I did this by adding more tape and packing the fingers gradually with cling film. 

I applied a thin layer of liquid latex, but I was not happy with the results, so I made a mixture of PVA glue and black ink and covered the hand with the mixture. It created a vinyl texture to the hand that seemed similar to leather or PVC gloves. 

The human body is only a container?

Throughout last week I kept coming back and thinking about my original approach to the brief, and through researching various artists that worked with space and the human form, such as Antony Gormley and to a lesser extent, Hans Bellmer, my ideas changed dramatically. 

I began toying with two different ideas, the first being the relationship between the human body and the space it occupies, while the second idea involved looking at the body as a container which holds a person’s physical internal space, as well as their 'imaginary internal landscape'.

At this time, I am focusing on the aspect of seeing the human body as a container, and the various things that it protects (or restricts). While researching, I came across photographs depicting mediums and paranormal ectoplasm. This led me to consider the idea of the soul and how it could be represented in the physical world. How would the soul react if it was leaving the body and entering the outside world without the protection of skin, bone and muscle?

What could I use to represent the soul? I considered different materials such as tape from a cassette, rubbish/garbage, vines and electrical wire

 I decided to begin making quick sculptures of hands and legs out of masking tape and cling film.

Print of a drawing of hands in my sketchbook. This is one of the things that inspired me to pursue this idea.