Fold over and let your brains spill out of your head, (study 1).
This work was a commission for Crown Building Gallery in Liverpool looking at photography in the broadest sense. I was asked to produce 5 images to be printed on a MX-2600N laser printer that was to be also located in the gallery space.
Results are to the right, a collaged research study which will aid future performances, looking at performative hybrids present in the daily exercising of belief systems. The selected images feature two women, Anni Puolakka and Jessica Olivieri, acting out various partner yoga poses and other gestural stances. Both women perform themselves, as Yoga teacher and Vegan Buddhist that they openly are. Shot to camera, the protagonists wear garments embedded with digitally embroidered patches, based upon algorithmic online searches of neighbouring belief systems. I am interested in the patch as a distilled sign, and its ability to contain a stamped ideology and be easily applied to clothing. The presented images have a rose-tinted color pallet, a decision made to represent a daydream womb like space and the instinctual fluidity that surrounds the process of appliqué image making.
The images present an equilibrium between the subject matter’s bodily content and textual materiality, one that contains contours (from both the bodies folding and the thread on woven cotton textile); balancing against the mediums prescriptive flatness of the laser printed image.
Fold over and let your brains spill out of your head, can act as a subtle entry point to a wider sliding scale containing the applications of belief systems and explores how we come to enter specific systems as potential coping mechanisms in a sign heavy, multi-timbral world. This research investigates what it means to live in culture built on appropriations.
This study looks into an ability to present tropes within a still image, that can then act as a springboard for future live action. My approach with photography was to apply a generative and explorative methodology, seeking to find a flickering harmony between the still and the moving, the real and the imagined.
