The photography and imagery I developed from my residency at Porthmeor Studios during the autumn of 2019 have been further developed into a short poetic booklet - many of the frozen forms seem to be a fixed or still moment in dance or non verbal expression. Here is a link to the digital version :
https://indd.adobe.com/view/d4229905-bb49-4c9e-b2ae-6c8fcb17eb7a
Pareidolia at Porthmeor September 2019
I started my residency at Studio 5 with an idea to explore Pareidolia – a term that describes how we find meaning in random patterns or imagery. Pareidolia has been attributed to certain incidents where people have claimed to have spontaneously seen religious icons in everyday, ordinary circumstances, such as the face of Jesus in a piece of burnt toast or angels in cloud formations.
I was curious about the possible links pareidolia could have with abstract art and I have often questioned a generalised 'need' to find meaning in certain art works. My research started with the film 'Junkopia' by Chris Marker (1982) where debris on the San Francisco coast was assembled into vaguely familiar forms placed in situ by a group of anonymous artists. 'Junkopia' resonated with me when I saw the film about Hepworth's sculptures; 'Figures in the Landscape' at the Tate St Ives.
To me, the films presented oddly dystopic imagery, with pagan undertones and felt vaguely relevant to our present-day climate crisis and concerns around the Anthropocene. For me, it conjured thoughts about how future civilisations could perceive and interpret our present age. With all this in mind, I began my visual with gathering objects and debris from Porthmeor beach and capturing sound/video footage of the immediate landscape. I attempted to explored abstraction and pareidolia through combinations of form and imagery in physical and digital formats to arrive at the point I am at now. It is still very much work in progress and I hope to extend my exploration through incorporating ideas around divination and tea leaf reading.
MOTHER OF PEARL HAS BEEN PUT TO WORK PRODUCTION LINE III
The following link takes you to a zine I developed to accompany the installation Production Line III in spring 2019. It interrogates ideas about hegemonic resistance via a pearl mollusc metaphor:
https://indd.adobe.com/view/00f25c2e-e508-47b3-ac86-db28fc615f8a
The following text accompanied the installation piece, ‘Production Line’:
In pearl farms today, freshwater mussels are put to work by artificial induction. Dead mussel tissue is inserted into the living to produce pearls (involuntary cannibalism?).
The foreign tissue irritates the fleshy mantle of the mussel and incites the creature to release nacre – liquid mother of pearl.
This magical iridescent substance, coats the irritant continuously until it sets and hardens to form a pearl. This practice exploits the mussel's natural immune system and the resulting pearl can be considered to be a beautiful type of scar tissue - evidence of survival.
I have produced a body of work with this in mind and liken the mollusc to systems, cultural behaviours or assumptions relating to the feminine. The work attempts to question the historical associations of the pearl with femininity as well as the commodification of various natural substances, female sexuality and reproduction.
The brutality of the work reflects my own experiences and interpretation of navigating through a male dominated landscape. It examines the oppression of gender construction, objectification, coercion and control and I'm attempting to interrogate this dynamic that pervades on a personal and societal level.