Yesterday’s work really helped me push along my work on this project and I can see that while both renderings of the last image – see here – offer view of blood they are both too transformative on their own. They provide a sense of texture – a map of blood and shit – and a colour tone that provides a sense of age and tiredness that I like. But they are too abstract and not visceral enough. So rather than grids of multiple renderings in a single frame I worked on producing a simple diptych that offers viewers a realistic rendering and an imagined rendering of my blood and shit.
Blood and shit, real and imagined
The above image works really well in terms of reflecting and contemplating on the nature of the referent but it fails to produce any visceral impact. So then I produced this….
Documented, real imagined
I really like this image. It speaks in the three ways I originally planned for the work: the first image evokes a visceral response – to shock; the second image allow viewers to think about the meaning of the blood for them and me; and the third image offers them an artistic evocation and offers my interpreted form of representing the blood and shit.
However a colleague’s comment on an earlier single version of the image drew my attention to the highlights in the last section of the triptych and so I experimented a little in making sure they did not disrupt the image and dropped the highlights a little. The result is shown below.
Blood and Shit: Experienced, Documented, Represented
Looking at the triptych I think it not only works as a discourse but also aesthetically by moving inward and closer at each image – from the real to the experienced and imagined/transformed.
So that’s just about it. I’m done with this project now. The work seemed to go down some blind alleys at points but I am very pleased with the result.
anomiepete 