As promised, I’ve decided to show a few more of the self-portraits that I completed for my final project at university. This was a complete immersion in practice, obsession and an exploration into human nature, experience and image.
Practice and research really became one force with this undertaking. As such, I figured out pretty early that art-based research and practice-led research paradigms would really suit the nature of the work.
Taken from Shaun McNiff’s Art-based research, he explains this as “. . .the systematic use of the artistic process, the actual making of artistic expressions in all of the different forms of the arts, as a primary way of understanding and examining experience.” It becomes both the practice of research, the research of practice and the experience gained from both perspectives on a multi-layered spectrum that becomes the important part here.
My research question was “how can the creation self-portraiture bring about a sense of self-identity in the artist?” This (at least to me) brings about something you’d think about only if you were cloistered inside a dark room without any lights on, and not being able to sleep. Immediately, in a way, it’s those darker situations that reoccur over and over that bring about those hard questions, things that really matter.
Situations like this bring about a commonality, something that can cross-over into questioning who we are and what/where are we going. Existence is a big part of everything we know, but it is usually negated, and so with this project I was looking at bringing those larger, often complicated but actually simple things back into place.
The face continually changes.Whenever we have another chance to catch ourselves in the mirror, or glance at a reflection in anything that presents us with our face, it is different. I found this was the largest reveal with my study: consistent mirages of the truth, because the truth seemed to be moving away from what I was trying to capture.
I won’t go too much into the theory and research side itself, but will let the images speak to and for you, without any necessary writing to convey my intentions. Ultimately, I came to realise that some things must remain unknown, including who we really are, and that a self-portrait can only reach the material basis of its subject; it can reach areas beyond this, and interrogate them, but nothing replaces the wonder of living itself and all the curiosities that come with it.
If you are interested in the research and writing I completed towards this project, please let me know, and I will forward you a copy.
Also, if you would like to see more of my self-portrait experiments, like the post and I’ll get to it. 🙂
Thanks,
Tom. 🙂
His Empty Space 