This week I did some painting using the flesh creatures I created with the mirroring effect in my old video editing program, from some nude movement films I made in the summer. Mirrored from top to bottom there are four legs and two bums and sometimes four arms. I painted a sort of beetle or scorpion human flesh creature, with multiple arms. Some becoming greenish and tendril like as though part plant. I see it as the embodiment of mind and body like a brain creature, echoing that there are brain cells throughout our bodies. In the videos, it is as though the creatures are slipping in and out of realms/worlds like quantum beings. The painting was a development work for one of the tall thin life-sized paintings, which I then started part way through the week, using oils and turning the creature fully green and also giving it an animal head; wolf/reptilian, at least for now. She is naked, voluptuous and she could be seen as the maiden aspect of the green goddess and looks vigourous and healthy and strong, but tender green like fresh spring shoots. I suppose I am trying to create a creature which is part human flesh, part anatomy of the brain, part garden/nature. I intend to work layers of paint over this and possibly collage again. I am also considering continuing the same painting/creature across onto another canvas, possibly with some sort of 3D connections between the two? Like papier-mâché over wire limbs or just cut out canvas shapes that can be stapled to the back of each canvas edge and would act like a hinge between the two…
Before I started the painting, I had a tutorial with Erica and discussed the further health research I had done with her and the ideas about the Disco protest. I then worked on my artists personal statement to try to order my thoughts, ideas and intentions, having fun with the nature themes and terminology.
‘Continuing with the cyclical, organic, creative process, where drawings, paintings and etchings generate characters, scenes, scenarios and microcosms. These sometimes precipitate a performance, which then becomes a poem, which creates sound and then video and back round again, redefining and confusing the contexts in a teeming, effervescing conglomeration.
I question the current situation we all find ourselves in, our mechanistic perception of health, our bind faith and codependence on medicine and our acceptance of CartesianDualism and scientific materialism and the medias systematic campaign of psychological attack. I put my thoughts, words and images through a series of disruptions and rearrangements. Like scrambling and encrypting. It mimics the censoring and polarisation that’s happening on social media. It is like gossip; each exchange or stage of the process changes the words a little more and sometimes the meaning. An encrypted narrative – it evokes misinformation, but is information not subjective? What is misinformation but non-mainstream opinion? Fiction, poetry, art? The landscape is disorientating; at times alien, then momentarily familiar. Here the words appear to make sense or are they nonsense?
Drawing on the cosmic, sexual, yogic holism of Tabitha Rezaire’s film work and Tai Shani’s poetic feminist story telling through her Dark Continent world-building, I have become a Dynamic Agent of Connection and as such, have created the Quantum Disco Protest within Club Embodiment, where we dance for the rights of the marginalized parts of the fragmented human and call for reunification of the whole Human Biocosmic Garden (and assert our independence from the codependent nature of conventional medical thinking).’
I hope the humour comes across enough in this and I don’t just sound really pretentious or mad with delusions of grandeur!
I have been using Premier Pro for my expansive module (Moving Image) and become more confident with it. I did some more filming this weekend, this time dancing and wearing dead grass and wool, vaguely shaped into clothes, to represent plant matter/tendrils and did some more mirroring effects. Started recording my voice playing the characters who might be dancing at the quantum Disco protest and making a dance track to go with it. I have included phrases which make it unclear which side I am on, if there are sides. Like ‘Down with Holistic Healers’, ‘Down with the body as machine” and ‘Down with snake-oil salesmen’. I will need to work on this more, as it’s very rough at the moment.
I have an open tutorial with Delia Baillie on Tuesday, at which I am hoping to ask her about painting techniques possibly first and foremost, but I will have a rough video with music to show by then hopefully to give an idea of what I am trying to illustrate…
Rachel Bride Ashton 