georgiachaos

[georgiachaos]

Final statement (before edited for word count)

My final piece is a performance documented by film and incorporating sculpture and prop. The over the top comedy, filmed and edited in the style of a youtube-influencer, follows a bloshy and increasingly scary internet sensation as she gives a tutorial promoting evermore sinister and obscene brands for her benefit, to the detriment of the girl at home who watches.

In my statement of intent I set out that I was going to be making work about the physical symptoms of my polycystic ovarian syndrome, and its effect on my body image. The project started off with me making work that fulfilled this intention directly, for example, my cramps bag. I also furfi

However through my research I found that at the core of this, my problem was not my condition, rather it was the societal pressure I felt to look a certain way. I know this has had a lot to do with the female influencers I followed on social media platforms such as youtube and instagram, and I knew the way I related to these figures was toxic. I consumed their content, internalised how it made me feel inadequate, I bought what they told me I needed to buy, knowing that they made money off me through this cycle, I knew I couldn’t trust them. Yet I wanted to, so badly. So in that sense my concept developed from my statement of intent through the realisation I was only scratching the surface at the time of writing it. In the statement of intent I had anticipated that my final piece might just exist as a sculpture but through the things i’d made, I had begun to realise I was creating a collection of props belonging to a character much stronger than my sculptures could have ever expressed. In other ways, I fulfilled my intentions, the work remained mostly biographical, relating mainly to personal experience with my body and, as I aimed for in my SOI the work is understood as being grotesque and monstrous. Like set out in my statement of intent, I looked to sculpture and jewellery to express my experience existing in my body, and to create physical extensions and hyperboles of myself. The entirety of the sculptures I have created have been wearable.

Of course, I would have liked to supplement my project through gallery visits and in person artist talks, however I was lucky in that my project concerned living life online, so i managed to research virtually, online artist talks, podcasts, reality tv shows and advertisements. Some of my research was instinctual, looking introspectively to my own body for answers. I had many conversations over zoom with women I know of varying ages about how influencer culture personally impacted their lives, if at all.

Before coming to my final resolution a lot of material experimentation took place. Through materials such as: expanding foam, paper mache, paint, resin, polymer clay, make-up, cardboard, newspaper, modroc, fake tan i created many different iterations of my concept. Media experimentation took place through photoshopping my images, editing my videos and

displaying my work on different platforms, ie youtube and instagram. I wish I'd had the chance to experiment with filming on different cameras and using different editing software but I was unable to access these resources during lockdown.Like I have said, after much material testing I was realising that my work was forming the basis for a strong character, and so performance seemed like the next logical step. I had wanted to do some performance prior to my final outcome; after I made my cramps bag I intended to go to my local sainsburys and do an exercise in a stockpile. The gut-like tote would have been stuffed with ‘feminine’ products i.e. 100 razors meanwhile film shoppers' reactions. But, due to the restrictions of the pandemic this was not possible. I am living with only my 76 year old dad who, in his own words would have ‘rather died’ than film me, and the shop was only letting in 6 people at a time, so we would have been there hours trying to film reactions and probably asked to leave. To overcome this I used an instagram post of the bag as my way of doing a public performance.

I came across film as a medium late in the project. After creating many sculptures, it became apparent I had been making all the props for something that would exist better as a digital character. Because I had never worked with film before I wish I had spent more time on this aspect of the project. In retrospect I think maybe if I’d have had more time I could have learnt how to edit and film my video with more skill.

Throughout the 8 weeks I have evaluated my process through reflective writing in my sketchbook and have continued to critically analyse my work through my blog. I have responded to tutorials, crits and peer discussions by making the necessary changes to my work.  

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To get around almost every influencer dominated platform deciding that my work ‘violates the terms of service’, I posted a recording of the video, in the 15 minutes before it got deleted from youtube, to Vimeo. I did this because I didn’t want to give up on the Youtube/Instagram experience. Youtube and Instagram are the official platforms of these influencers, and although it might have been funny for me to try and become an influencer on Vimeo, in a sort of so-wrong-its-right way, this wouldn’t have spoken the language, or come into the virtual sphere of, the people who were wanting to watch a real influencer tutorial. 

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Figureing out where the video should live.

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A new direction for the film and why.

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Figuring out improvements in response to crit feedback.

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Stills from the performance video and evaluation. I haven’t decided where the video is going to live yet in terms of on what social media platform so I cannot upload it to my blog at this moment that will have to come later.

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Story board for a film was about to make, documenting my performance as an influencer.

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By this point I had realised that in my previous work I had effectively been making props for what was looking like it could be a strong character. Everything I had made spoke in the same language and looked as though it belonged to one person. I had decided I was going have to become that person because photos of me with the items where falling flat. By becoming the influencer, the owner of these fake boobs, hairy fingers and piece of shit, I could bring this character to life instead of it living statically through the previous photoshoot. Here is the research that informed by performance.

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Outtakes from the shoot

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This is how I chose to document and display the peices. I place myself as the model, the neck peices elongates my neck as though I am a the subject of pre-raphelite painting, or am reaching a moment of Devine organsm. the Astro-turf adds this cold, discomfort to the photograph, i think it tells the viewer that they cannot trust this as a true advertisement. The other give away of this is of course, the sculptures, they are too ridiculous to ever be sold by any respectable jewellers which makes it funny when placed in the visual language of advertising that we are so used to. The word Cartier boldly edited on top was more of a joke... I wanted my Instagram followers to have a laugh at my work.

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Subsiquent hairy rings and neck peice made. A follow on from the paper mache boobs.

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Designs for bikini top breast plate. My material tests proved to me it was going to near impossible to come up with a solid full chest breast plate with what I had at home. The breast plate has traditionally been amour, which comes with associations of war and masculinity. Faced with the challenges of limited materials and wanting to play on the masculine tradition I decided to create a massive titted, hairy chest bikini top. During quarentine I have been watching loads of the real house wives of Beverly Hills. The reality tv show follows 6 women who lifestyles are funded largely by their husbands. The bikini top designs where inspired by one scene in the show where the women discuss their breast implants, and boast the size and cost of their boobs. The women have had so much work done that they have become to look like sex dolls. I don’t deny these are interesting women, I watch them everyday of the quarentine, so the way they have chosen to modify their bodies, to look as though they should be in the darkest corners of a man’s smelly wardrobe or in a shed, hidden away from his wife and children, feels a bit bizarre to me. A quick google search of ‘breastplate’ revealed a funny modern v traditional juxtaposing. Today, a breast plate is more commonly worn by drag queens, people who (if you’re lucky) take the piss out of gender stereotypes.

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In 2019 social media star Lisa-Ali, who appered to her 1.1 million followers to be living a life of Luxery in excess, was exposed by her landlord to be living in a grim squaler. Her landlord reported conditions in her flat where so bad professional cleaners had refused to clean it. Most amazingly to me, she conclead this lie from her fans by keeping a corner of the apartment clean, where her mirror was, so she could continue to take photos of herself without revealing herself. Interestingly, or perhaps not, I personally wouldn’t have thaught someone having a dirty apartment would be interesting enough to make the news (granted it was REALLY fucking dirty) but we’re used to this - we’ve seen much worse on hoarding shows. The story circulated for weeks, it was in every online tabloid but also made print in major newspapers- it seemed people were totally desperate to see an influencer fail, or struggle at least. I think this story hits at the root of my project, I’m not sure I actually care that these women do what they do, I think it’s the decite that doesn’t sit right. It’s the total lack of honesty about what life is really like, and think this story appealed because we were desperate to have the fact that these women are people, who aren’t always on top of life, just like us, confirmed.

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Material tests for different types of 3D breast plates

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Carrying on with hirsutism as a way of expressing the hormones dictation over the female body I wanted to create a breastplate from my maquette that I made earlier on in the project. Obviously, with limited resources this was going to be tricky. These photos are my first attempt at relating the art back to my body. I asked a friend to photoshop images I had found of a pornactress boobs with a stockphoto of chest hair on top. My friend spoke to me about how weird it was to have to virtually behead a pornstar to achieve what I wanted to print onto the t-shirt. I thaught this was interesting as up until that conversation I hadn’t considered how the porn actress would feel about her breasts being appropriated and covered in chest hair for my art, espically without payment. I also didn’t find anything particularly interesting about how this turned out visually. I’m thinking maybe I’ll cut it into a crop top to get rid of some of the boring white space. I don’t think I’ll be moving forward in this medium.

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