My work for my degree show was all about exploration and experiences, the exploration of myself the artist, but maybe even more the exploration of the visitor’s engaging with the work. Materials have become extremely important throughout my practice the expressiveness of the material itself; using materials to change individual perception and perspective in an attempt to catch the attention of the viewer. The aim was to persuade viewers to further experience the object.

 My beaded sculpture was characterised by careful surface treatment and  payed particular attention to detail. The result was that the intimacy of the surface enticed the viewer to assess it so minutely that the wholeness of the work is lost in the abstractedness of its detail. The sculptures are elegant statements of my ideas and values.

My work highlights connections between women’s objectification and their fragmentation in the visual arts. I created organically influenced shapes - the male and female body fragmented. A vagina is not only a pocket within a body, lined by a mucous membrane, but also an extension of the world, a small cul-de-sac of the world outside the skin. Questions of visibility, sensation, the dichotomy of inside and outside, smoothness, and identity all depend on skin. Throughout the project, I researched other artists and philosophers, (such as Lygia Clark, Laura Mulvey, John Berger, Orlan, Robert Mapplethorpe), whose work explores how the human body is used, modified and fragmented in an attempt to influence the observer’s experience of an object or image.

The aim of the work was to encourage and persuade the observer to interact with the work thus becoming part of the installation. I think there is something fascinating about stimulating the senses. In order to create sensation within the viewer I set out to heighten the senses through the object’s materiality; its texture, added scents, manipulated visual qualities including colour. During this engagement between object and spectator, the object’s visual and physical stimulus may manipulate the observer’s perception of the object.

The final piece was protruding from a board or wall, about one meter in length.

The object was purposely placed around one meter off the floor so that it is level with the viewers mid region, twisting its beauty from real to surreal. The gallery lighting accentuated the pearl detail and the object’s delicacy. 

I wanted viewers to be drawn to further investigate the object in front of them. An object cannot be recognised or identified without it first being characterised in a certain way. The experiences which each person brought with them enabled them to identify or characterise the physical object or facts about it to a certain extent. Once sense experiences are triggered, different ideas and responses have to be explored and integrated.

This project helped to further develop the idea that a sensation is derived from a response to something. The science of response; what does experience feel like? Any act of sensation is accompanied by feelings of pleasure or disgust; in order to derive the sensation of pleasure or disgust, the senses must be stimulated. The materials became the modification device, the fetishised item or tool, used to manipulate and transform the perception of the observer. It is the appropriation of an object to then transform and modify it to become another thing. Additive composition to an object explicitly alters appearance, this is what I wish to achieve.

 COPYRIGHT 2007