Miranda Clare Marchant

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.

• See how the pots turn out. How they are going so far seems good, but I want to see how they will fire. As I am mostly used to working with 2D, Dave Beech was a bit sceptical about me working with ceramics. We’ll see how it goes, I want to try something different
• I am going to do some recordings of different people saying the poems, I might alphabetize some ‘ordinary’ people’s words as well, for example friends and family. I think that a sound piece might be interesting
• I am also going to film the paper speeches burning. It will show how fragile and temporary people’s words are. How vulnerable and disposable they are.
• I’m going to experiment with the paintings that I’ve started. I think that they will be quite useful, not necessarily as a final piece but as a progression and a way to experiment with the poems
• Look at how I can manipulate pictures of people and transform the meaning of their words by taking them out of context.

I created these line drawings from pictures of the beautiful models that I found in Vogue magazine. I drew them this way as to reflect them in a not so aesthetically pleasing way; we aspire to look like these women however all their purpose (in the photographs) is to look beautiful to sell a product. Many women aspire to be like them – basing their lifestyles around an advert in the desperation to make themselves feel happier and more attractive.

I have taken some quotes from Vogue and sculpted them into speech. I decided not to turn them into poems, but to instead take them out of context. Transform their meanings.

Paul Kindersley is a particularly interesting artist that came to Chelsea for an artist lecture. He created lot of interesting work involving drawings, living sculptures and videos. The element of his work that I found particularly interesting was how he creates work using his body- transforming himself into a piece of artwork. It is as if he is creating a portrait of all of the different elements of himself, painting himself the colours of how he is feeling that day.

Because in a way I am looking at making portraits of people from their words, it is interesting for me to look at different ways that people interpret them. I will probably experiment with creating artwork from my body (or somebody else’s) in the future

I was first introduced to Cy Twombly’s work last year by my tutor at the time, ever since then I have always been drawn to him and his intricately messy paintings. For me his art is the epitome of ‘my five year old could have made that’, but it becomes very clear that they couldn’t when you try and replicate it. He uses a very successful colour pallet; his work is very stimulating to look at.

I get a lot of my inspiration from Twombly; my style is of the messy persuasion and I am drawn to lots of colour. For this project I might create some Twombly influenced paintings as I find that it is a very good way to incorporate words into paintings without it looking tacky.

This painting has quotes from the Winston Churchill poem entwined into it, the work itself inspired by Cy Twobbly’s work. I love creating big messy paintings; I feel that they express more emotion than precise drawings. I created this painting using red, white and green paint, mixing it on the paper. This is another way that I could possibly transform my poems. I will probably develop these paintings and involve them in my exhibition

In these photographs I have taken Winston Churchill’s speech and I have burnt it, not in a way to say that I disagree with them (as burning things are usually a sign of hatred), but to create ashes. All that we know of Churchill is from what historians have told us and from his famous words, which are still being spoken about to this day. When people die it is a very common for them to be cremated- the ashes are their body, who they are and they are a symbol of what they were when they were alive. All that we know of Churchill are his words. As they are all of what we know of him, the burnt embers of his speeches are just as significant to us, if not more, than his actual self.

To progress from this idea I want to film the words burning. Fire is a very emotive and beautiful thing, and I think that by filming it might lead me onto some other idea. The idea that I currently have for possible progression is to record people I know saying the poems that I have written. I want to see how these words sound coming from lots of different dialects, accents and ages. I will probably experiment with the different sounds to see that I can create something that fits with the burning of the paper. I want to make sure that I have something other than just the pot to fall back on, because although I am pretty confident I would rather be safe than sorry. Also this seems quite experimental and it might lead me on to advancing in some more ‘dangerous’ work in the future.

These are some photographs of some ceramic maquettes that I’ve created of quotes from the poems that I have structured. The poems are influential speeches (whether they be good or bad) from Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. To create the poems I have alphabetized the words in the speeches to create what I see as an intellectual stutter. These were inspired by Sousan Luqman’s piece Pitch – looking at the irrelevance of words. I was intrigued by how she made the words just a visual thing, tearing the words away from what they were actually intended to be and creating something purely aesthetic. I have done a similar thing with these poems, but instead of making them visual I have torn them away from their meaning and given them a totally different meaning and purpose.

These blocks intended to look like the clippings of words that I made the poems from, I have experemented with different fonts and when these blocks are fired I will evaluate which is most effective.

A.

A against.

Also…

And,

And as

As avoid be been,

But care Christian Churches,

Cruelty, decades declare destroyed disease,

Diseases faire from,

From guiltlessness.

Have,

Have healthy,

Hereditary,

Honest.

If individual intentionally is it lassez life?

more. more.

More nation.

No. Not cruelly of other over,

Past, point, policy quite ready.

Ready.

Rebel.

Refrain.

Should sphere sterilizing suffering,

Support take than,

Than the,

the. the. the. the the.

The them,

Themselves, this, those,

Those to

to. to. to. to. to. to.

To treatment.

We were whole.

Wish,

Who would?

These are some pictures from the exhibition ‘Some Are Smarter Than Others’ exhibition at Gasworks by Pio Abad. This exhibition was looking at how some objects can have social and political implications, involving photographs of silverware pots and a red flag which looked somewhat like the Soviet Union’s. As a concept this was an interesting idea as it looks at the fact that a simple object can harbour a lot of history and emotion, and even if an object were to simply resemble one that may have been involved in some significant event, it can cause a stir. When I heard the title of this exhibition, it immediately reminded me of George Orwell’s book ‘Animal Farm’. This is a book inspired by communism (as most of his books are) where a farm of animals takes down the farmer and they create their own ‘equal’ society. In this book there is a line which says “everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others”. There must be some kind of inspiration from this book.

Physical objects can stir nostalgia, and it is definitely true that they can be symbolic of a time and place as well. This flag is just a piece of material with a pattern on a stick. Yet, somehow it means a lot more to us than just that. The use of the Soviet flag is quite interesting because although a lot of terrible things happened under the Soviet Union, as English people I feel that the Nazi symbol is more striking to us. I think that this is mostly due to the fact that we aren’t as well educated about the goings on in and around Russia as we are of Germany in that period of time.

In my opinion this exhibition was sparse and not as well executed as it could have been. I think that the artist who created this piece of work had put more effort towards the concept than the actual piece. Having said that, as I have had time to think about his work it has made me think about the significance of purely physical things as a way of telling stories and remembering bad (or good) things that have happened in the past