Birds

Ack, oh dear, no blogging over the holidays.

Have started this year with much more enthusiasm for our upcoming essay than the Community Project we're meant to be getting on with.. I've chosen the question on feminist critiques on the way women are represented in contemporary visual media. In reality, I'm much more interested in how they are portrayed in advertising than in film, so I might need to tweak my question a bit..

The books I'm reading are generally interesting, though I can't help that sometimes women read too much into certain messages. Yes, prejudices, even presented subtly or unconsciously need to be challenged, but the sometimes it feels like some of the authors are making it seem like every second advert is condoning violence, objectification of women, alcoholism, etc. I might need to do some primary research and count up all the adverts I could pick away at and find something morally objectionable, but now I'm rambling a bit..



Anyway, this particular image in one of the books I'm reading did strike me as particular sinister and genuinely shocking. Even on the surface it's still advocating plying your woman with alcohol if they won't go along with what you say... before you even think about the other underlying suggestions of date-rape and violence..

Right, constructing an argument for my essay is not really what I should be doing on my blog. Unfortunately I haven't done any good drawings this holiday, so here are a few brief sketches from the zoo

Oh yeah..

I've kinda managed to scan in some of my personal project:

First of all, go listen to Shellac's Prayer to God. You will obviously appreciate what an awesome song it is and see why I chose it for my 'lyrics' project. Only I chose to disregard most of the lyrics and concentrate on the idea of coming up with as many 'fun' ideas as I could for killing him.





These are some of the cards I made. They're pretty crude I know, and unfortunately all smudged because the ink on the backs stuck together :(

My mum said they were a bit 'obscene' - praise indeed

Oh dear...

Incredibly lazy on the blog front.. whoops. My portfolio has been in the studio for a few weeks being marked so I guess I'll scan in a few images from sketchbooks done over the past few months.

Why am I doing this? Speaking to fourth year flatmates is rather depressing. Listening to Andy bitch and moan about having to apply for jobs, when he gets given a website with a huge list of potential employers, contact details, job perks and vacancies, just reinforces my gloomy conclusion that I have been an idiot and chosen a course with no real career prospects at the end of it...

The Beach

Fairytale Brief

I'm not sure if Cecile ever got the image but oh well, it was only a week's work anyway:

Collage

We've spent the last week doing collage in Photoshop. At first I felt restricted because it's hard to keep in mind all the source material available - all the images I have scanned in are tucked away in neat folders and I can't have them spread in front of me all at once like I normally would. I like how collage produces an image determined by what source material you have (or don't have). I would normally use collage as experimental development and find it hard to form concrete ideas. Hence the images I have produced are led by aesthetics and a 'feeling' rather than a moral/message.

The images produced are inspired by the Guardian's Grayson Perry article 'What I know about women'. I thought it was a piece of text very open to interpretation; chock full of wonderful sentences to blow apart and explore. If I'm honest I'm not sure about the result: I think I was a little too determined to use certain images in my pieces just because I'd spent so long digitally cutting them out. I'd have liked to produce a wee system map or flow chart - depicting what, I'm not quite sure.. So it's not quite the image I had in my head (there were more dismembered limbs), but meh, it's collage.

..I've just realised I hadn't meant to leave that arm (against the diver) in the first image.. muhh

Older stuff

A bit of a mixed collection from the last many months..