FMP Week 5

After exploring different artist's work, I especially felt that the ideas Damien Hirst was considering with his 'Forms without Life' were resonating well with the themes I was looking at myself.

On a weekend trip to the Norfolk coast, I took the wonderfully well-timed opportunity to pick up a variety of sea shells. In the first image below (left to right) I arranged them by colour, light to dark. This was initially in order to organise the various shells I had collected, including the ones I would not use - I had thought to arrange them by size, but that proved more difficult to see given that the colours stood out so much more to me.

 I then thought to make the comparison between the shells (vital components of the organism they once were) and the screws (similarly vital components of the machinery they held together) much more obvious - I didn't think that just having existing photos in the same book would draw a conclusion stark enough that someone perusing would grasp effectively, so I attempted to combine the images.

I feel that this worked a lot well with the third image above (far right) as opposed to the central image, as the comparison in the middle is obvious to the extent I feel like I'm insulting the viewer. Whereas the final image (wherein one of the shells is replaced by a screw) manages to compare them on the same level. I think that having only one screw present makes it appear as if the screw has 'snuck in' the line up; it has made more of my peers when observing, question what on earth the screw might have in common with the organic pieces.

I enjoyed working with the shells, they were an awful lot more fragile than the materials I have been using these past few weeks, and many of them broke. I decided that it would be good practise to document this.

The result of that documentation was the previous series of images. There are endless possibilities of ideas that could be read into, just in the sequence of the two pictures, and there has been a large variety of responses from the stimulus - like has been the case for the entirety of my final major project.

Words like 'explosion' and 'erosion' and 'destruction' are fairly common, and after more thought, 'change', 'development', 'progression'. Personally, I can't think much past the surprise of 'violence' despite the clean white and blue tones of both the shell and the background.

In fact, perhaps the clinical colour scheme exacerbates the violence I see. However, this could be because of my own medical history - frequent visits to hospitals mean that they are a very familiar environment, associated with injury, illness and (perhaps much less so) recovery.

This experimentation with components found in nature has been a welcome break from the metal, I believe that next week I will see what other pieces I can find outside that could be used to form more sophisticated metaphors.