Folio Two Artist Statement

Not me, But me is a series of digital media and mixed media on paper with projection. It is a collection of distorted, merged and beautifully haunting self-portraits that interrogates aspects of difference, repetition, and the invisibility of chronic illnesses.

Not me, But me explores the medicalisation of the self-image by comparing the act of drawing and the trace as mark to the medical imaging of the body and the trace that is left behind. A concept that Petherbridge talks about in The Primacy of Drawing. This is particularly evident in the large self-portrait that is made from mixed media (pastels, watercolours, prismacolour pencil, charcoals etc) and then stitched together. The merging of the medical imaging upon the outside of my body shows the invisible illnesses as visible in an attempt to document and illustrate my daily human experience. The stitching of the large work emphasises that traces of these surgeries, tests and scans are left behind, they are never truly gone. Once somethings is taken apart, it can never perfectly be put back together.

I have expanded upon my digital collage experiments from my first proposal and have created secondary collages from them. These collages explore my invention of the new normal, a concept I created in my first proposal. My ‘Normal’ is constantly evolving. An altered space of the everyday. This is expressed within each collage. There are so many ways my everyday space can be changed. 

I am currently studying Renaissance art and am drawn to the self-portraits of the master artists. From the idealised proportions to the soft colour palettes to the posing of the model. Not me, But me reflects my immersion into this research through the lens of self-portraiture. This has culminated in a collision of the romanticised notion of the Renaissance portrait and the invasion of medical imaging and surgeries upon the body. Idealised proportions and posing versus the reality of the human experience. The result of this collision is a series of obstructive selfies, anti-selfies, expressing human vulnerability and the decay of the body.

The artists that I have been looking at include; Ellie Kammer, Jenny Saville, Mike Parr, Jesse Draxler, and Renaissance artists like Albrecht Durer, Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo. Mike Parr’s work is particularly relevant to my work and concept. The importance of the self-portrait and the disembodied human head, not showing the body that it is attached too.

On Parr’s work Graham Coulter-Smith and Jane Magon write the following:

Parr is embarked upon a search for something which can never be found, a self which is inherently lost. Our being, Being in general, is lost - that's why we are so obsessed with finding it. The human irony is that we are strongly motivated by a quest for identity, but our very mode of seeking prevents us from ever finding it. We seek ourselves via self-representation, but the very act of re-presentation is the antithesis of that self-presence we hunger for. Each act of self-representation is a disappointment because it can only ever produce a trace, a burnt out replica of that self presence we desire.

…charcoal drawings, with their physical record of the artist's hand, evoke the theological ideal of the artist's presence…the traditional aesthetics of presence.

This is particularly relevant to my work. I am drawn to the medium of self-portraiture as a way to re insert myself back into the world.  To discover my own identity and document my daily experience. Even though the outcome can never fully be truthful to what others see, I continue to find new ways of representing myself.

While my concept has remained the same since my proposal, the finished series took a different direction in execution. I ended up expanding upon the digital collage experiments and creating secondary works from them. For this series, installation is about lighting and projection. The larger work has been created with projection in mind. While the other collages were created to be displayed alone. In an ideal world, I would have individual lights on each collage, to better show the projection.

For future works, I can see myself continuing with larger scale portraits.