Unit 3: The Personal Investigation
- This a practical unit with written elements in which candidates are expected to develop a personal investigation based on an idea, issue, concept or theme leading to a finished piece or pieces.
- The practical elements should be linked with some aspect of contemporary or past practice of artists, designers or craftspeople.
- Candidates should be selective when deciding what to submit for this unit.
Quality of Written Communication
As the quality of written communication is an important aspect of this unit candidates should consider the following points:
- Written material of a critical, analytical nature can be included in a variety of forms, such as a personal study, a journal, a log, reports on gallery visits or an evaluation and reflection on candidates’ work and that of others.
- Written material should be no less than 1000 and no more than 3000 words.
- Sources should be identified and a bibliography and list of visits should be included.
- Candidates should demonstrate that they are aware of the discipline of working within given word counts.
- Ensure that text is legible and spelling, punctuation and grammar are accurate so that meaning is clear
- Select and use a form and style of writing appropriate to purpose and to complex subject matter
- Organise information clearly and coherently, using specialist vocabulary when appropriate.
Personal Investigation
My investigation explored the relationship between photographic images and the words used to describe them. I employed various levels of indeterminacy to generate both images and text which are then forced into both uncomfortable and serendipitous association. I began my personal investigation by analysing the practices and strategies of the surrealists from the 1920’s and 30’s, starting with their use of games, chance and indeterminacy. I was drawn to this period in history because it was a time of artistic advancement where unexplored and subconscious ideas were the forefront in art. I created a photography game entitled 'Travel the Distance' based on the life of a National Geographic photographer, William Albert Allard. In terms of Surrealism the game was mostly based on notions of chance and indeterminacy, as the role of the dice was to determine the player’s outcome in the game. This use of chance created a sense of the unknown, much like many of the surrealists’ games themselves. This includes the infamous ‘Exquisite Corpse’, a game which combines structure and pre-determined process with the crucial element of chance. Surrealism as defined by André Breton is “Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought.” This was such a revolutionary idea at the time, because society had been living by the strict rules of rationality and reason prior to World War I; order had led to chaos. The surrealists were able to manipulate and play with images, yet in the process create a new, liberal, illogical yet successful new outcome. This idea inspired me to experiment with some other surrealist games, such as the random word game, which created obscure sentences and the ‘Anonymity game’ in which you visually display your conscious and subconscious thoughts. This encouraged the expression of inner states, emotions and ideas which were shared and liberated in order to help steer art away from the logical and the rational and into the new irrational. To help further emancipate the unconscious, I decided to keep a dream diary. Ian Breakwell is a contemporary artist and diary keeper who recorded “the side-events of daily life, by turns mundane, curious, bleak, erotic, tender, vicious, cunning, stupid, ambiguous, absurd, as observed by a personal witness”. The use of a dream diary enables our subconscious, intimate thoughts to be written and expressed either in words or images. Whether we choose to share these thoughts and dreams is down to the author, yet even the art of acknowledging and freeing our subconscious dreams is a further step towards liberty, which is the ultimate aim of surrealism- both personally and politically.
I was keen to learn more about the origins of surrealism and therefore did some research to find out what inspired them. I was drawn to the literary and poetic influences of the surrealists, such as Stéphane Mallarmé and the Comte de Lautréamont who provided the famous definition of surrealist beauty: "As beautiful as the chance meeting of an umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table." I discovered the artwork that accompanied Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem "Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard". Intrigued by both its ambiguous content and physical appearance, I used this to develop my own personal investigation, writing my own poem and taking a series of photographs which I felt corresponded with the emotions in the poem. I was influenced by Alfred Stieglitz and his theories associated with Equivalents as I also wanted the viewer to respond to the images instinctively and think how the photographs I took relate to the poem. I used Stieglitz’s technique of corresponding photographs to emotions to convey my own interpretations, which did not need to be obvious as it would make the piece more interesting if each person interpreted the photos differently. Stieglitz believed colours, shapes and lines reflected inner states and emotions merging his “basic philosophy of life” with his photographic skills to create a series both aesthetically beautiful and personally philosophical.
I also decided to experiment with photomontage, a technique used by Surrealists which I found interesting. I thought William Burroughs’ cut-up technique would provide the crucial element of chance and randomness which I used with both words and images. I decided to do this because I felt that Stieglitz’s Equivalents theory was more of a psychological approach to surrealism, whereas photomontage is a more visual take. Combining both these elements of visual and psychological enabled me to approach surrealism from two contrasting sides, exploring both the similarities and differences of two different art forms merging together. Chance was still utilised in many ways in this piece. Firstly, the cut-up technique enabled me to create an ambiguous piece of prose which has no need to make sense, allowing paradoxical and riddling phrases which made the viewer think about and relate to their own personal thoughts and perceptions to the art work. Secondly, our mind subconsciously makes links between photography and literature, this exercises the viewer's subconscious and again makes them think of emotional connections to photos and vise versa. The layout of the piece is fairly ordered, however ambiguous enough that the series of equivalents require thought and comparison to the poem. I decided to raise the poem using foam board so as to give an emphasis on the literature and enable the equivalent photographs to act as a secondary element to the piece. I then decided to refine this and incorporate even more of a chance element into my work. I decided to keep the poem the same but alter the way in which I took the photos. Instead of the images reflecting the poem, I decided to use art books and take each letter of the first phrase of my poem and go to that page in a random book. I then took a phrase out of that book and decided to re-create it using photography. This was a complex process but easy to practice and led me to have no idea which photo was originally linked to which phrase. I also enlarged the images I felt portrayed the poem most to reflect back to the idea of Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Although the layout and end product was not much different, the refined version was conceptually better and looked more intriguing as the viewer was more forcefully thought to question the photographs surrounding the poem and create a link between the two art forms.
Following this, I was still interested in pursuing the idea of text in photography and how literature and photography are connected however, I also wanted to explore the idea of distortion. I took this idea from my previous project as I was looking at creating images which distorted the meaning of my poem. I took this distorting element and played with it by distorting bodies instead of text. Firstly, I experimented with a range of distorting techniques including, water, kaleidoscopes and transparent film, where water gave the best photographic effect. I refined the images I took to see if I could alter them even more in Photoshop using the adjustment levels and curves to make my images more two-toned. This relationship between ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ and Surrealism is interesting, both are phenomenon of 1920s modernism. What connects them, is an interest in the ability of photography to see the marvellous in the everyday. However, new objectivity is more concerned with observable "truth" whereas the Surrealists were interested in psychology and inner "truth" alongside the visible world. After selecting my personal favourites and editing them, I discovered how unnerving and uneasy my own photographs made me feel. This intrigued me as they were simply photographs of the body which is a familiar shape to us all, yet I began to see the body as a state of disorder and something that is continuously changing and depends upon an individual’s perception to be seen as ‘beautiful’. Artists such as Claude Cahun, Jacques-André Boiffard, Man Ray and John Coplans influenced my work and furthered my understanding of the notion of ‘beauty’, enabling me to photograph the body in a way that challenges my own perception of beauty and creates an evolving idea of how we should view beauty. Boiffard’s work had a particularly strong connection to my own practice, exploiting the human body in such ways that arouses an element of disgust. The body and disorder are often only seen as having physical links, this inspired me to think of previously unthought of connections between the body and disorder and illness and force these two terms together into a photograph. I thought more about the idea of bodies and decided to move away from just the human body and focus on states of disorder using bodies of communities, people and other forms. I aimed to challenge and disrupt the rules of order and exploit the chaos element in things which led me to then move away from physical bodies to look at representations instead.
I then began experimenting with the different ways in which I can alter and disrupt the process of the photographs. I changed the lens I was working with to a macro lens in order to contort the ‘typical’ face and body. I also used a slow shutter speed to create a sense of motion, moving the camera and using the zoom for a hazy and blurred effect. I then used Photoshop to create Duotones which further made the face unrecognisable challenging notions of unconventional beauty, this is not altering beauty but exposing beauty where someone may not have initially thought it was present. I used inspiration from my previous work with the use of text and photography to further develop this idea. This time I decided to involve a different art form, which I decided was audio as I feel an audio recording is more juxtaposed to a photograph than literature. With the audio recordings I wanted to keep the content quite minimal and bleak so as to give an ominous effect and allow the viewer's attention to not be drawn away from the photos. This again is making sure my running theme of the unfamiliar is present. The content of the audio recordings was a collection of the speaker’s own thoughts of my photos and a few of my own words which I gave as a prompt for the speaker. I asked the speaker to talk in a monotonous and bleak way, this enables the listener/viewer to interpret the piece based on their own feelings and leaves a canvas for different emotional responses. I then decided to move away slightly from the restriction of distortions and open up my practice to changing the familiar into the unknown. Developing this idea of the unfamiliar and the uncanny, I realised how I had been using the camera to distort and transition the body, so I then changed this and experimented with documenting the unfamiliar with the camera. I moved away from the two-tone distorted faces to enable myself to experiment with how else I could create the body and the face as an unfamiliar being. This unfamiliarity hopefully evoked new feelings within the viewer as I tried to create an image which affects a wide audience. I did this by researching how culturally people have changed the appearance of others to be more 'beautiful'. Examples of this are the footbinding in China and the Amazon tribes that elongate the heads of babies. These were interesting ideas, as to a western audience they are absurd and disturbing images, yet to specific cultures it is viewed as normal or beautiful. I also looked at western representations of the unfamiliar body and as a response to both interpretations of beauty, I then experimented with recreating the body modifications, using both the western 'fashion' ways and the more traditional cultural methods. I took a selection of images of parts of the body and printed them out and used western materials to recreate the modifications and merge both the western and cultural methods together to form a mixed media photo. To help me achieve these modified images I used acrylic paint to drip down the face, and thread to give the impression of a distorted photo and create a slight sense of uneasiness to the viewer. The conjoining of the different ideals of beauty helped to include this sense of the unknown and also alter the viewer’s perception of beauty.
To develop this experiment, I wanted to alter how the subject was deformed or unfamiliar. I did this by changing the way in which I stitched the photo- stitching the front and not pulling the thread leaving it loose on the surface, I also turned the photo over so I could not see which part of the face I was stitching. This all added to the modification of the body and further to a sense of disgust and uneasiness by including the unfamiliar and the abstract effect which creates a much more different type of product compared to the more decorative style of the previous experiments. In conclusion from this experiment I decided that the overall effect of the images did not work as well as I had hoped, which led me to my next idea. I was originally looking at modifying the body so I decided to bring this back and the element of disgust that I was trying to create. I attempted to do this by getting fruit skin and stitching together different parts of this so as to disguise its original shape. My idea was that it hopefully evoked feelings of peculiarity in the viewer and helped further my idea of modification. I then began looking at deconstructing images and piecing them back together but in a new and unfamiliar way as a development for this experiment.
Developing this idea, I decided to use a photo that I had previously taken and alter the scale and size to create it on a much larger scale. Instead of using A3 size I printed the same photo off in A0 size and began to plan methods to achieve the idea of deconstructing and piecing it back together. Working on such a large scale hopefully gave the viewer an overwhelming sense when observing the photo and required them to stand back to see the whole picture. Although not necessarily the element of disgust was created like I had been experimenting with earlier, the large scale, tied in with the content of the photo will hopefully generate feelings of interest. I decided to treat the photo like a person to incorporate my own feminist viewpoint into my work. As a female photographer I wanted to change the perception of women in photography, not by simply photographing them but instead by altering the male's position in photography. Therefore, I treated the print as a person, I slept next to it, talked to it, sprayed bleach onto it and physically scrunched it up. I used Metzger's 'Acid Action Painting' as inspiration for the use of bleach as Metzger 'paints, flings and sprays' acid onto his canvas, I adapted this to represent the oppressive treatment towards women in the world of art and to also show how ideas are temporary and can be corroded by other ideas- whether this be in art, metaphorically or literally. This gave the effect of treating the print how women have been treated in history and subverting the idea of the male gaze as I am now using the male as the subject. The subject of the image is unconsciously being 'gazed' upon and objectified. I am tying all my ideas together by using an image from my earlier work, but also adapting the modification to represent a reconstruction of the face.
For my final piece I settled on the idea of my A0 print of one of my previous images. The image was edited on Photoshop to still keep in my original theme of evoking the feeling of repulsion and unease. I also tied in my own feminist ideas of how I believe women should be viewed in the art world, and in doing this have taken Gustav Metzger's notion of 'Auto-Destructive Art' and his work featuring acid and replicated this by using bleach on my A0 print of the male's face. The idea was to reflect how women have been treated throughout history but in a way which creates curiosity and grabs the attention of the viewer, not necessarily in the same way but portraying internally or physically how women have felt as a result of this oppression. Both the print and the documentation of the results of my altering of the print after each time will be the final piece. The photos were printed 4x6 and they were originally to be displayed next to each other in a line to show how over time, the treatment towards women has not progressed but instead society has found just new ways to oppress females, however the single A0 print gave enough impact and the smaller photos detracted from the bleached print. The size of the documentation photos were simply to juxtapose the large A0 size of the male face and add a sense of sarcasm to show how irrelevant a woman's work may appear next to that of a man's.
From this personal investigation, I have learnt that sticking with original ideas and simply developing them to be more detailed, allows a much more creative process which gives the work direction and meaning. Although embarking on new ideas can be refreshing, I constantly found myself going back to one set of photographs I had previously taken and wondering how I could improve them. What I discovered was that thinking on a large scale is not as impossible as I originally thought, and often the larger you think, the more you are able to unlock ideas which creates a constant flow of creativity. Technical-wise I have learnt to use various lenses and explore different mediums within photography.
I was keen to learn more about the origins of surrealism and therefore did some research to find out what inspired them. I was drawn to the literary and poetic influences of the surrealists, such as Stéphane Mallarmé and the Comte de Lautréamont who provided the famous definition of surrealist beauty: "As beautiful as the chance meeting of an umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table." I discovered the artwork that accompanied Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem "Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard". Intrigued by both its ambiguous content and physical appearance, I used this to develop my own personal investigation, writing my own poem and taking a series of photographs which I felt corresponded with the emotions in the poem. I was influenced by Alfred Stieglitz and his theories associated with Equivalents as I also wanted the viewer to respond to the images instinctively and think how the photographs I took relate to the poem. I used Stieglitz’s technique of corresponding photographs to emotions to convey my own interpretations, which did not need to be obvious as it would make the piece more interesting if each person interpreted the photos differently. Stieglitz believed colours, shapes and lines reflected inner states and emotions merging his “basic philosophy of life” with his photographic skills to create a series both aesthetically beautiful and personally philosophical.
I also decided to experiment with photomontage, a technique used by Surrealists which I found interesting. I thought William Burroughs’ cut-up technique would provide the crucial element of chance and randomness which I used with both words and images. I decided to do this because I felt that Stieglitz’s Equivalents theory was more of a psychological approach to surrealism, whereas photomontage is a more visual take. Combining both these elements of visual and psychological enabled me to approach surrealism from two contrasting sides, exploring both the similarities and differences of two different art forms merging together. Chance was still utilised in many ways in this piece. Firstly, the cut-up technique enabled me to create an ambiguous piece of prose which has no need to make sense, allowing paradoxical and riddling phrases which made the viewer think about and relate to their own personal thoughts and perceptions to the art work. Secondly, our mind subconsciously makes links between photography and literature, this exercises the viewer's subconscious and again makes them think of emotional connections to photos and vise versa. The layout of the piece is fairly ordered, however ambiguous enough that the series of equivalents require thought and comparison to the poem. I decided to raise the poem using foam board so as to give an emphasis on the literature and enable the equivalent photographs to act as a secondary element to the piece. I then decided to refine this and incorporate even more of a chance element into my work. I decided to keep the poem the same but alter the way in which I took the photos. Instead of the images reflecting the poem, I decided to use art books and take each letter of the first phrase of my poem and go to that page in a random book. I then took a phrase out of that book and decided to re-create it using photography. This was a complex process but easy to practice and led me to have no idea which photo was originally linked to which phrase. I also enlarged the images I felt portrayed the poem most to reflect back to the idea of Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Although the layout and end product was not much different, the refined version was conceptually better and looked more intriguing as the viewer was more forcefully thought to question the photographs surrounding the poem and create a link between the two art forms.
Following this, I was still interested in pursuing the idea of text in photography and how literature and photography are connected however, I also wanted to explore the idea of distortion. I took this idea from my previous project as I was looking at creating images which distorted the meaning of my poem. I took this distorting element and played with it by distorting bodies instead of text. Firstly, I experimented with a range of distorting techniques including, water, kaleidoscopes and transparent film, where water gave the best photographic effect. I refined the images I took to see if I could alter them even more in Photoshop using the adjustment levels and curves to make my images more two-toned. This relationship between ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ and Surrealism is interesting, both are phenomenon of 1920s modernism. What connects them, is an interest in the ability of photography to see the marvellous in the everyday. However, new objectivity is more concerned with observable "truth" whereas the Surrealists were interested in psychology and inner "truth" alongside the visible world. After selecting my personal favourites and editing them, I discovered how unnerving and uneasy my own photographs made me feel. This intrigued me as they were simply photographs of the body which is a familiar shape to us all, yet I began to see the body as a state of disorder and something that is continuously changing and depends upon an individual’s perception to be seen as ‘beautiful’. Artists such as Claude Cahun, Jacques-André Boiffard, Man Ray and John Coplans influenced my work and furthered my understanding of the notion of ‘beauty’, enabling me to photograph the body in a way that challenges my own perception of beauty and creates an evolving idea of how we should view beauty. Boiffard’s work had a particularly strong connection to my own practice, exploiting the human body in such ways that arouses an element of disgust. The body and disorder are often only seen as having physical links, this inspired me to think of previously unthought of connections between the body and disorder and illness and force these two terms together into a photograph. I thought more about the idea of bodies and decided to move away from just the human body and focus on states of disorder using bodies of communities, people and other forms. I aimed to challenge and disrupt the rules of order and exploit the chaos element in things which led me to then move away from physical bodies to look at representations instead.
I then began experimenting with the different ways in which I can alter and disrupt the process of the photographs. I changed the lens I was working with to a macro lens in order to contort the ‘typical’ face and body. I also used a slow shutter speed to create a sense of motion, moving the camera and using the zoom for a hazy and blurred effect. I then used Photoshop to create Duotones which further made the face unrecognisable challenging notions of unconventional beauty, this is not altering beauty but exposing beauty where someone may not have initially thought it was present. I used inspiration from my previous work with the use of text and photography to further develop this idea. This time I decided to involve a different art form, which I decided was audio as I feel an audio recording is more juxtaposed to a photograph than literature. With the audio recordings I wanted to keep the content quite minimal and bleak so as to give an ominous effect and allow the viewer's attention to not be drawn away from the photos. This again is making sure my running theme of the unfamiliar is present. The content of the audio recordings was a collection of the speaker’s own thoughts of my photos and a few of my own words which I gave as a prompt for the speaker. I asked the speaker to talk in a monotonous and bleak way, this enables the listener/viewer to interpret the piece based on their own feelings and leaves a canvas for different emotional responses. I then decided to move away slightly from the restriction of distortions and open up my practice to changing the familiar into the unknown. Developing this idea of the unfamiliar and the uncanny, I realised how I had been using the camera to distort and transition the body, so I then changed this and experimented with documenting the unfamiliar with the camera. I moved away from the two-tone distorted faces to enable myself to experiment with how else I could create the body and the face as an unfamiliar being. This unfamiliarity hopefully evoked new feelings within the viewer as I tried to create an image which affects a wide audience. I did this by researching how culturally people have changed the appearance of others to be more 'beautiful'. Examples of this are the footbinding in China and the Amazon tribes that elongate the heads of babies. These were interesting ideas, as to a western audience they are absurd and disturbing images, yet to specific cultures it is viewed as normal or beautiful. I also looked at western representations of the unfamiliar body and as a response to both interpretations of beauty, I then experimented with recreating the body modifications, using both the western 'fashion' ways and the more traditional cultural methods. I took a selection of images of parts of the body and printed them out and used western materials to recreate the modifications and merge both the western and cultural methods together to form a mixed media photo. To help me achieve these modified images I used acrylic paint to drip down the face, and thread to give the impression of a distorted photo and create a slight sense of uneasiness to the viewer. The conjoining of the different ideals of beauty helped to include this sense of the unknown and also alter the viewer’s perception of beauty.
To develop this experiment, I wanted to alter how the subject was deformed or unfamiliar. I did this by changing the way in which I stitched the photo- stitching the front and not pulling the thread leaving it loose on the surface, I also turned the photo over so I could not see which part of the face I was stitching. This all added to the modification of the body and further to a sense of disgust and uneasiness by including the unfamiliar and the abstract effect which creates a much more different type of product compared to the more decorative style of the previous experiments. In conclusion from this experiment I decided that the overall effect of the images did not work as well as I had hoped, which led me to my next idea. I was originally looking at modifying the body so I decided to bring this back and the element of disgust that I was trying to create. I attempted to do this by getting fruit skin and stitching together different parts of this so as to disguise its original shape. My idea was that it hopefully evoked feelings of peculiarity in the viewer and helped further my idea of modification. I then began looking at deconstructing images and piecing them back together but in a new and unfamiliar way as a development for this experiment.
Developing this idea, I decided to use a photo that I had previously taken and alter the scale and size to create it on a much larger scale. Instead of using A3 size I printed the same photo off in A0 size and began to plan methods to achieve the idea of deconstructing and piecing it back together. Working on such a large scale hopefully gave the viewer an overwhelming sense when observing the photo and required them to stand back to see the whole picture. Although not necessarily the element of disgust was created like I had been experimenting with earlier, the large scale, tied in with the content of the photo will hopefully generate feelings of interest. I decided to treat the photo like a person to incorporate my own feminist viewpoint into my work. As a female photographer I wanted to change the perception of women in photography, not by simply photographing them but instead by altering the male's position in photography. Therefore, I treated the print as a person, I slept next to it, talked to it, sprayed bleach onto it and physically scrunched it up. I used Metzger's 'Acid Action Painting' as inspiration for the use of bleach as Metzger 'paints, flings and sprays' acid onto his canvas, I adapted this to represent the oppressive treatment towards women in the world of art and to also show how ideas are temporary and can be corroded by other ideas- whether this be in art, metaphorically or literally. This gave the effect of treating the print how women have been treated in history and subverting the idea of the male gaze as I am now using the male as the subject. The subject of the image is unconsciously being 'gazed' upon and objectified. I am tying all my ideas together by using an image from my earlier work, but also adapting the modification to represent a reconstruction of the face.
For my final piece I settled on the idea of my A0 print of one of my previous images. The image was edited on Photoshop to still keep in my original theme of evoking the feeling of repulsion and unease. I also tied in my own feminist ideas of how I believe women should be viewed in the art world, and in doing this have taken Gustav Metzger's notion of 'Auto-Destructive Art' and his work featuring acid and replicated this by using bleach on my A0 print of the male's face. The idea was to reflect how women have been treated throughout history but in a way which creates curiosity and grabs the attention of the viewer, not necessarily in the same way but portraying internally or physically how women have felt as a result of this oppression. Both the print and the documentation of the results of my altering of the print after each time will be the final piece. The photos were printed 4x6 and they were originally to be displayed next to each other in a line to show how over time, the treatment towards women has not progressed but instead society has found just new ways to oppress females, however the single A0 print gave enough impact and the smaller photos detracted from the bleached print. The size of the documentation photos were simply to juxtapose the large A0 size of the male face and add a sense of sarcasm to show how irrelevant a woman's work may appear next to that of a man's.
From this personal investigation, I have learnt that sticking with original ideas and simply developing them to be more detailed, allows a much more creative process which gives the work direction and meaning. Although embarking on new ideas can be refreshing, I constantly found myself going back to one set of photographs I had previously taken and wondering how I could improve them. What I discovered was that thinking on a large scale is not as impossible as I originally thought, and often the larger you think, the more you are able to unlock ideas which creates a constant flow of creativity. Technical-wise I have learnt to use various lenses and explore different mediums within photography.