Major Practical Project - Penny Klepuszewska

Penny Klepuszewska's project entitled 'Living Arrangements' focusses on how, where there is no family support close by, elderly people can often live an extremely isolated life, in some cases never even leaving their house. Here follows an extract from her artist's statement.

"'Living Arrangements' investigates an important subject for a society still coming to terms with its ageing population, sparked by the disturbing statistic that one in ten of our elderly people spend their lives utterly alone rarely encountering another human in their solitary day-to-day lives. The work focuses on the significant changes in family life over the last two decades and how this has created a large and expanding number of elderly people who are living alone, often with deteriorating health and no family support to hand. The home is often regarded as a place of shelter but for some in later life it can become an island of isolation, "a place of uncertainty, positioned between the conflicts of past memories and present emotions." Belovai/Spence 2011"

"Living Arrangements (No.23) 2006" © Penny Klepuszewksa

"Living Arrangements (No. 22) 2006" © Penny Klepuszewska

"Living Arrangements (No. 1) 2006" © Penny Klepuszewska

To me, I can just never imagine the home to be anything other than a place of shelter, a place you can always count on. I've never considered that for some it can become a prison; essentially cutting you off from the world and somewhere you grow to resent. Is this purely down to age? Or are there other factors to consider. Although these images don't contain people, they are almost portraits - set up to suggest that the scene has just been left, only moments ago. The minute details stand out - crumbs on the tablecloth, a dribble down the side of the pan, the single baked bean left on the underside of the metal spoon. Given the highly constructed nature of the images, this tells me these details have been deliberately included - perhaps suggesting that when you spend all day every day in the same routine, the smallest changes can take on new significance. So I know what I feel about my home, but what about if I was confined there? Perhaps it is nostalgia that is providing me with rose-tinted memories of the place.

http://www.contemporaryartsociety.org/become-a-member/artist-member/penny-klepuszewska/496

Major Practical Project - This Is MY Home

Major Practical Project - Hamish Gane

An extract from Gane's artist's statement from his '200 Seconds' project.

"The photographic image is both implicated in, and antithetic to, memory, for unlike the mental image of a past event, it is able to imprint itself on our memories repeatedly without relinquishing any of its vividness. Family photographs and films are revisited in order to re-live an event, but with each viewing, it is the recorded images themselves that become further implanted in memory.

In this work, a leather case in which family cine films have been stored for over twenty years is converted into a camera"

"In stark contrast to the present digital proliferation of personal photographs and their distribution through social networking sites. Traditional black and white paper negatives are digitally scanned then printed to the same scale and dimensions as the projection screen on which the films were repeatedly viewed on family occasions.

These mise-en-abîme images are part of an extended photographic and theoretical investigation, exposing and exploring a space between the Bergsonian notions of perception and recollection. It is intended (with reference to the still photograph’s accepted associations with death) that through an amalgamation of cinematic and photographic time, new life may be given to the resulting images."

"amsterdam- 1973" ©Hamish Gane

"snape, august 1983" ©Hamish Gane

"yorkshire, easter 1976" ©Hamish Gane

 What speaks to me in this project is that fact that these images have absolutely no emotional context for me, but yet are clearly so personal to the artist. We are looking at a glimpse into his family's past, and although I don't know anything about them, looking through all the images I can already relate to some of the situations. The fact that family holidays are always documented, and that there always has to be one 'nice family photo' to take home. Gane's delving into his own memory allows the viewer to delve into their own. His use of a pinhole camera and Super 8 film also conjures a feeling for me of everything being homemade, which it seems to me is very important in this project. Would it have the same effect if he shot the images on a hi-tech digital camera, or had the movies transferred to DVD? In my opinion, no. At the risk of repeating myself, it is all home-made, even down to using the case which the films were stored in as the pinhole camera. Every single aspect of this project is born of his family and their memories.What is highlighted in this project is that every family is unique - whether they are close, distant, large or small. If every single person in the world did this same projects that results would be so varied, and that is the charm and appeal of the images for me.

http://www.hamishgane.com/

Major Practical Project/Dissertation - Nostalgia...

So this week has been all about ideas. Thinking and talking. It's always a big fear of mine, sharing my ideas, but I have discovered this week that nothing bad can ever come of it. Either I will get a pat on the head and be told to get on with it, or I get to learn where the holes are and how to plug them.

So I have been thinking about Home. Both the concept and my actual home. My idea was to document every place I have ever slept, but when questioned about WHY I would want to do that, I was completely stumped. Is that something I think the world would actually be interested in? Perhaps not. It took two people asking me these kind of questions to make me realise what I actually wanted to document: My Home. I know in advance that all the rigmarole of trying to discover which places out of the many that I have slept in I would call home would inevitably end in one answer - the place I feel the strongest bond to being the place where I grew up, and where my parents still live.

And so we get on to Nostalgia. It's something I experience on nearly a daily basis. Not missing home, that's not how I feel. What I feel is much more positive, happy reflections, let's just say. I want to give credit to my home and my upbringing for the chance to have these feelings that I know a good amount of people don't have. Photography is synonymous with nostalgia and memory and now I know that this is what I want to explore, with particular focus on the following:

Analogue - Faking it: Exhibition shows photo tricks over 150 years

Oh how I wish I could go to this...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19956530

Major Practical Project/Analogue - Erlina Gotterson

So recently I have been thinking a lot about the idea of 'Home' What do we mean by the place we call home? Somewhere we spend most of our time? Simply the place we sleep? Somewhere we own? I'm going through that phase in my life where I have a couple of places I call home - about 200 miles apart from each other. For me, a big part of my identity some from where I was brought up; having had a pretty stable and secure upbringing may well give me a different view of where I call home to someone in less fortunate circumstances. Immediately I was struck by a piece of work done by a very good friend of mine, Lennie Gotterson, for her foundation degree. It looks in intense detail at the area she was brought up - in amongst rows and rows of terraced houses which, on first impressions, look extremely similar. However, she has used an ink line drawing to highlight the small differences between each house.

© Erlina Gotterson

© Erlina Gotterson

© Erlina Gotterson

For me, this work reminds me of how, when you have lived in a place for a certain amount of time, and when you walk past the same houses every day, you get to know them by memory, even when the differences are very small. In my opinion, that's when you can call a house your home, when your life returns to normality after having moved there, when you become used to your surroundings. However, by this logic, if you sleep in a place for long enough, can anywhere be called a home? A hotel? A doorway? A tent? Someone else's home? Definitely something to think about...

Analogue - An Essay Idea...

Turns out this is what I do when I have an idea and no paper to hand...

Major Practical Project - Initial Ideas

Now that I am well and truly scared about this project, I thought I ought to get a few ideas that have been swirling around in my mind out there and onto paper. Recently, the things that I thought I wanted to do photographically have completely changed, leaving me thoroughly confused. For me, physically picking up a pen and scribbling down what I'm thinking at that moment really helps to clarify my thinking. So this is what I am feeling like this morning. Who knows, tomorrow I might decide something completely different.

Analogue - Maurizio Anzeri

So there I was, in the middle of a lecture, thinking about how images created using analogue processes can be doctored and altered just as much as digital ones. There's an aura around a hand printed image that always makes me assume that what we are seeing is true, trustworthy, honest. But what happens when human intervention on a printed image goes to the extreme? What is created are individual, unique artefacts. Nothing demonstrates this more than these fascinating images I stumbled across by Maurizio Anzeri (More of his work can be found here: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/maurizio_anzeri.htm?section_name=photography) He calls them 'photo-sculptures', using found images and embroidering them to give a whole new visual dynamic.

© Maurizio Anzeri

© Maurizio Anzeri

© Maurizio Anzeri