I chose to paint on board rather than on canvas in my choice of materials. Based on past painting experience, although canvas is the most commonly used support for oil paintings, board is more suitable for delicate paintings and has the advantage of very smooth brush strokes. I used thick pigments to build up the texture of the wool after the first laying down of the colours. The texture of the snow and trees in the background is again distinguished from the texture of the main sheep, and a different technique is used in the painting of the grass and leaves. For me, the wooden board is more helpful for me to paint the texture of different objects.
The ‘Symbiosis’ dolls are based on an addition to this body of work, I chose the doll as an object to represent childhood, and used acrylics and colouring powders on the original dolls to transform their faces to express two different personalities of myself, and then stitched the two dolls together to express the two differences of me as one individual.
Photograph with my mom
Watercolor paper print,20x30
Before proceeding with the formal painting of the piece I started with a set of shots with my mum, in which my mum was positioned close to the camera and I was in the distance. I used the principle of perspective as a metaphor for my position in the family: a ‘’subordinate relationship‘’.
I then printed the photos on watercolour paper, which surprisingly gave them a foggy feel and an added hint of hazy memories. I think this is very much in line with the feeling brought by family and childhood trauma, and I am often distracted by those vague and clear feelings in my memory. In order to emphasise my mother's superiority and our subordination, I used watercolour and water stains to create a secondary work.
One piece is the result of a combination of photographic and typographic experiments with my motif of hybridisation, combining my own eyes with a pet dog. The adoption of emoji is a pictorial take on the pop culture of everyday mobile phone communication emojis, serving as amusing metaphors and allusions.
For the background of the work, I chose a bright sky and grass as an expression of the surrealist aesthetics of the ‘dream core’. The combination of basic images, emojis and real objects shows a kind of absurdity and black humour.
My interpretation of ‘love’ is based on the fact that female mantises may eat their male mates after mating due to the need for nourishment. Therefore, I chose the praying mantis for the animalisation and combined it with my own head.
The background is a velvet sofa, which is a metaphor for the glamour of the ceremony, and the mantis species is an orchid mantis to show the beauty of women.
The picture on the right is simulating the process of keeping praying mantises, which usually requires window screens or nets to keep them hanging. This simulation is used to get closer to the animal, or to sense the animal's feelings.
Having gained a good command of the clay material in Unit 2 and having made some works with clay frames, I continued in this unit, breaking away from the one-dimensional painting. In the frame of ‘Me and You’, I carved ears, which means ‘listening’. It represents my desire to be heard, to speak, and is a metaphor for exploring my identity and seeking recognition.
For the clay outer frame of this piece of Sweet Home I shaped a lot of spines and acrylated them to a metallic colour. As the kernel is an expression of the subordination in my family, especially my relationship with my mother, which allows me to show obedience only in this relationship. This feeling of repression and bondage has been present from childhood to the present day, a kind of trauma from the family. The thorns on the outer frame are a metaphor for my attempts to break free from this bondage, to rebel, and also to form thorns that can protect myself in some way.
I thought of the Chinese proverb: ‘Marriage is the grave of love’, which is ironic, but also reveals some truths. So I associated it with a coffin and moulded the clay into the shape of a coffin, while the ribbon echoes the gorgeous velvet sofa in the background, suggesting the sweetness of love or the beauty of marriage.
All the clay is left to dry completely naturally and then coloured with acrylics and oils, waiting for the paints to dry completely before applying a special coating for the clay as a final coat, resulting in a relatively strong and transparent texture.
Me and carousel
In order to get closer to my childhood memories, I took photos of playing on the carousel, specifically using an old camera that existed in my house when I was very young. The unclear quality and colours correspond to the feeling of the ‘dream core’ pictures, and to make the effect closer, I used PS to glitch my face. It also symbolises the unclear self in the blurred memories, as if I am now an adult going back in time.
In addition to the three main pieces, I used a triptych to paint the carousel as the overall background. The merry-go-round is also a reflection of my state of mind, the process of constantly searching for myself, healing wounds and seeking happiness. In addition to oil paints, I also used airbrush tinting, letting turpentine-diluted oil paints flow freely on the canvas to create hazy and faded memories, and used blue and pink for the colour scheme, taking into account the ‘dreamy’ nature of the painting.
I used nails as supports to bind the three stencilled oil paintings on a canvas with a carousel background for final assembly. This step is also the mutual transformation of two-dimensional and three-dimensional paintings. The final presentation is three-dimensional, but the work presented by the binding on the canvas is also a whole, and the protruding stencil oil paintings can be transformed into a flat image that exists as a kind of collage again.