Where I'm at Pre Tutorial

What was I trying to communicate?
I liked the way in which my mind map linked things I like in everyday life to my creative concerns through its love of discovery and the weird and wonderful. I.e. I love travel/ meeting people because I like finding out weird and interesting (unusual) things about them (this is the same with discovering and collecting unusual objects). This explains my love of research/ the research based nature of my work. It also explains my love of unusual/ surreal/ conceptual art - I like it because its strange but also clever and thought about.

In this work I took some of the weird objects that I collected and used them as a means to represent my love for research and discovery of unusual things - concepts, ideas and objects. I started assembling them in scenes. In the face images I was using them to represent this strong divide in my personality between order and chaos - by how they are assembled.

I also abandoned this use of the objects and started to create surreal scenes which represented the most important areas of my practice and what I have discovered this year. I like the fact that everything in the image makes total sense to me but to anyone else it is total surreal chaos - pretty much like everything that goes on in my brain.


Below ground is total chaos in contrast to above ground which is quite still and everything has been vigorously arranged in lines (personality split)
The roots represent the roots of my work in research
The ears/ emptiness on the right side of the page represent the total still quiet I need to focus/ get any work done
The arrow to the single man represents selectivity and the lesson I've learnt in blogging - runs alongside my image making
The bubble of the glass skull which is being popped by the bird represents the creative bubble that I have kept myself in which needs to be popped. (keeping my life/ work too separate)
All of the objects are also appropriated from my room or things that I have created in past briefs.
I could definitely represent some of these things in less literal ways but I like the concept of creating an ambiguous surreal world as a way of mapping out myself and what I have learned.