This is a bad quality photograph of my final major project from last year. This piece was looking at people, their personalities and how they related to me and other people. This piece consisted of two huge paintings and a projection. I am fascinated by people, I find it really interesting to learn about how different people interpret information. I am also amazed by the fact that every single person in the world has their own mental dialogue, their own hopes and dreams and an anthill of friends and family. Every single person that you have ever walked past, everybody that you have ever sat next to on the tube or waited behind at a coffee shop. This is a concept called sonder which my life and my work is massively drawn to.
My work was inspired by the Myers Briggs personality test, I made friends and family complete the test where I grouped them and then incorporated them in a certain part of the paintings depending on which group they fitted into. The test is a set of questions which gives you four letters. An I or an E for introverted or extraverted, an N or an S for intuiting or sensing, a T or an F for thinking and feeling and a J or a P for judging or perceiving. It then filters you into one of sixteen groups which fit into one of four larger groups. Without going into too much extensive detail the four groups are intuiting, sensing, feeling and thinking. For example I am an ENFP, which means that I fit into the intuiting group. To completely explain all of the test would take far too long and draw away from my work, but this is the basics. These are the groups that my piece was based on. I created three paintings based on this idea. One was intuiting and sensing, the other feeling and thinking and the third was a combination of them all. These paintings were more for my benefit than anything else; I used them to work out how the different people around me think. It was my way of working something out- using a painting rather than writing out an essay or reading a lot about it to understand different people.
For the video I got some of the people that I made do the test talk about their personalities. What they look like, what they think they seem like to other people and I also got them to describe a significant other to me. This made the paintings seem alive – rather than them just be a colourful 2D piece on the wall I had something real projected on top. Because the subjects that I chose were comfortable being filmed it was very raw and natural, exactly how I wanted them to be. I would definitely do another film piece this year because it creates something real, rather than something that is just visual. For me, I think that films make me look at art in a way that I can empathise with more than I can a stationary piece; If I can see something move and be alive I can relate it to the reality around me much more easily
My paintings were influenced a lot by Keith Tyson; he created huge nonsense mathematical paintings. I like the idea of creating something that looks intensely difficult but is actually complete rubbish if you look into it – it’s like creating a sci-fi story; the character in the book or film will be explaining something that seems to be vastly intellectual, but in reality it means nothing. That is almost what I have done with my paintings, there are lots of things that look like equations and graphs, and I am using actual words from books about the Myers Briggs test, but actually the equations make no sense.
To develop this I would look into different types of materials that I can use, for example different textures and types of filming. I will also look into different ways that I can do performances and look at artists such as Adrian Piper to give me a push forward in developing my specialism.
This was the most interesting and experimental piece that I created last year. I have found that if I find a subject that interests me then I will thrive and feel the need to experiment and take risks more. This year I am going to make more film pieces and I am also going to base my work on things that I want to learn about. I think that the self-directed element of this course has the potential for me to create some more creative work because I can base it on whatever I would like.