#karintwatson

Sweet Disposal

A series about valuable places, animals and experiences. I asked several friends to send them photos that meant something to them, among the various replies I was inundated with pictures of family pets, meals, and places that had caused reflection, relaxation and awe in the people involved. 

Working with the theme documentation and editing I experimented with capturing moments until I decided to edit one of my photos to resemble something else. This lead on to a series of experiments with deconstruction, experimenting with surrealist photography and glitch art. I considered the unpredictable nature of asking friends for photos to be a very exciting and fun part of this series. I learnt lots of sweet and joyful facts about many of my friends felt special to receive these images of their beloved pets, their favourite meals and their favourite places.

In this work I was inspired by a variety of artists who had used erasure and deconstruction in their art to both document and delete. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, as well as glitch artists Patrick Garbit and Adam Ferriss.

My final box transformation resulted in a a visual representation of self care. I begun with an analogy of a bucket whereby filling the bucket with nice things is symbolic of self care. It struck me as I was looking at an empty box that had once been home to a diary owned by ten year old me. The diary being an item used to record thoughts and feelings, and the box by extension a place to store those introspections.

When considering the appearance of the box with its happy childlike outer appearance, yet a stark white inside with a massive heart mirror I felt that it had a dismal personality and mood. Deciding to make a visual representation of the bucket analogy I employed stop motion techniques while filling the box with objects which I felt were comforting and aesthetically pleasing. The use of blurring in certain parts was intended to be symbolic of how when faced with anxiety people flit between states of assurance and hazy doubts.

This being an experiment where I hadn’t known that I would end up enjoying the process and final outcome so much there were many imperfections in my end piece (jaunty camera movements, framing issues, lighting considerations). I do feel that these imperfections add to the piece as it explores anxiety and by nature anxiety and overcoming anxiety is never a perfect process.

My transformation of an ordinary box involved recreation of a new form, through the experimental process of destruction and reconstruction. My final work produced vessels made from ‘cardboard pulp’, a combination of the corrugated cardboard of a storage box with PVA glue and boiled linseed oil.

Before starting my project, I looked around my house to be shocked at the amount of boxes we have; boxes for storage filled with unused items. Containers for the unwanted material things we buy and neglect everyday. 

My lengthy process started by tearing and stripping down the box, similar to how millions of tree trunks are harvested and stripped of their limbs to be sent to pulp mills. This was expressive, my destruction of excessive materialism and mass-production that these storage boxes represent. Soaking the pieces of cardboard overnight was like a process of rebirth. The brown sludgy mixture that formed was reminiscent of mud and soil. 

Over days of hand-squeezing the moisture out and attempts of sculpting, a plaster mixer drill attachment finally allowed me to create a finer mixture with which I moulded three vessels (a cylinder, a hemisphere and a rectangular prism).