FYP – lesley's headspace

Text-heavy update

As promised, I’m spending December ironing out my content and approach for FYP, and I’ve narrowed my deliverables down to these three things: a book containing a narrative, the gallery space as an installation relating to the book’s narrative and a process book (thanks for the advice, Beverley!).

At the moment I’ve been focusing on the narrative the most because it’s the centerpiece of what I’m doing. I’m doing a kind of homage to Greek mythology, to House Of Leaves and to all the good literature that has influenced me over the years, while bringing in my illustrations/skills in layout design to complement the content. I haven’t figured out the visual style precisely yet but my aesthetic has been heavily influenced by The Sick Rose and Crucial Interventions. It’s very likely that the book will be hardcover, but I’m not clear on dimensions yet. Here’s the narrative, from one of my brainstorming sessions with B:

This is the story, which I’m working on now. My ideas are best explained over text to B, because I’ve spent most of the FYP period talking to him about my project. This narrative lets me bring in aspects of the Castor and Pollux myth as well as the larger canon of Greek mythology, and gives me an avenue for illustration (I can draw all the hybrids) and grotesque/freakshow ideas that I researched on earlier in the semester.

Here are my initial thoughts for the setup:

The idea is that while the reader is following the stories of Paul and Pollux, they’re standing in front of a mirror, which (as mentioned in the screenshot) will reinforce the ideas of duality and madness. I may also want to incorporate mirrored text into the book pages itself so that the environment can add directly to the experience of reading the book. I haven’t decided where to place the process book, but the walls of this space are likely to be covered in my own drawings (perhaps simulated pages from Paul’s drawings of medical hybrids, and drawings of Castor and Pollux/page extracts from the book) so that people who don’t get a chance to read the entire story get to glimpse the whole project just from the space alone.

Please let me know what you think if you’ve got time to drop me a comment, see y’all next semester and I’ll be back soon with more updates! For now, I will be writing and sketching to work out what I’m going to do with the book, space and process book.

FYP Crit Reflection + Trajectory Update

Takeaways from last Friday’s FYP crit:

Be aware of work sliding into overly introspective territory (i.e. try not to make it so obvious that you’re using the book as a vehicle to do what you want/draw what you want)
For presentations, trim the content/research a little bit more – I received feedback that suggested I had too much research

Honestly I didn’t receive much criticism about my theme, trajectory or illustration style (I’m genuinely surprised) or in fact any suggestions as to how I can improve my project. I’m going to take it as a sign that I should continue moving on and engaging in research and conceptual thought.

Moving forward, I will be writing more and drawing more and gearing up for production. I want to start settling the content of my book and experimenting with visuals (spreads, illustrations, etc). I might include unrelated conceptual drawings as part of my explorations on duality, but I’d like to get a second opinion. I’m quite inspired by the approach of Crucial Interventions to blending a vintage medical aesthetic with modern grids and type (pictures when the book arrives, I ordered it online for Christmas).

I’m thinking of working more with geometry and anatomy in my illustrations for my FYP. This is contemporary and trending now among dotwork/blackwork artists and it’s recognizably current visual language (that I have been using as well). I think it’s all going well and I shall produce more variations on this theme. Another thing I’d like to try is collaging royalty-free medical images from the Wellcome image database. They could supplement my own illustrations within the book.

300815 Sketchdump

So today I started work on the huge amount of illustrations I’m going to use for FYP, and here’s a character I created along with his more scientific-looking skeleton. I haven’t added a background to the first illustration yet, but I plan to (so as to experiment with Takato Yamamoto’s style – I really admire his work and I’m giving it a go trying something of my own as a homage to him).

I haven’t decided how detailed each drawing should be, but there will be a difference between anatomical drawings and illustrative drawings (I have some freakshow posters to make). I’ll find a way to bring everything together. My work is quite obviously contemporary so it’s not going to be an ancient grimoire as much as a compendium with an 1800s-meets-contemporary aesthetic.

280815

So today in class we had our usual FYP discussion, and I managed to crystallize even more of my project. In summary, what I am doing is called Case Studies of the Grotesque (working title), and in the tradition of books like The Resurrectionist I’m going to be working with a pseudoscientific approach and an 1800s-inspired aesthetic to tackle themes of grotesque fantasy and the foreignness of the human body.

What I need to do now is:
1. Focus on scientific visual language as well as writing (i.e. the kind of writing style in which research is penned down, for a sense of veracity in my own storytelling)
2. Investigate grotesque realism, metamorphosis, sex, erotica
3. Writings of Mikhail Bahktin pertaining to the grotesque body
4. Photography of Joel-Peter Witkin (for mise en scène in my compositions)
5. Is this a disease, genetic mutation or fantasy thing? It’s not really clear yet how these physical mutations I’m dealing with come about, and I haven’t clarified that yet.

So far, what I have is:
1. Several drawings for my Chinese village case study (related to Chinese face reading, except instead of moles it’s fingers)
2. A written case study about a circus freakshow, no drawings yet but I’m going to create compositions with this in the style of Witkin, alongside the other compositions I already have)
3. A half-written case study about a pleasure house whose inhabitants are these people in advanced stages of the disease (inspired by the erotica aspect of ero guro nansensu)

What motivates me is:
1. Lines of tension between the beautiful and the grotesque (Takato Yamamoto’s Heisei Aestheticism); this is especially present in ero guro nansensu as well as shunga
2. Detailed anatomical illustration – not scientific because such levels of accuracy are probably beyond my practice right now, but heavily inspired by traditions of scientific illustration

I’ll be blogging about all these separate topics over the next few hours to archive all the ideas that were generated in class and attempt to answer some of the questions that were raised for me to consider.

Skull drawings

Deformed skulls to go with the previous set of illustrations I did earlier. I had to google bone spurs and finger joints and wonder to myself about how the underlying bone structure might look.

FYP Thesis/Report

Writing helps me place things in their proper mental boxes. I’ve been reading two of my favourite FYP reports (by Gillian and Qi Xuan, their projects are utterly captivating to me) over the past couple of days and I’ve decided to sketch out my FYP outline here as well after reading Beverley’s OSS (hi Bev I also think you’re inspiring).

1. Abstract
2. Introduction to project
3. Literature Review: body horror + psychosomatic afflictions + ero guro nansensu, layered/immersive narratives (House of Leaves, The Resurrectionist) and puzzle books, medical/scientific illustration, fiction and fact
4. Possible focus on my fascination with the grotesque, with horror and the human mind, madness
5. Writing as a key part of my process
6. Working process as a whole
7. Bibliograpy and references

[NSFW] Guro: The Erotic Horror Art of Japanese Rebellion

In the deranged world of ero guro nansensu, the stranger and grosser an illustration, the more prized it is.

…

Not to be confused with pornography or horror, pure ero guro nansensu is distinctive in that it focuses on dark erotic fantasies paired with really disgusting things.The name is taken from the English words “erotic grotesque nonsense,” and so blood and violent gore does not always necessarily feature in—a girl with ten eyeballs stuck in her genitals could be just as valid and incongruous. Back in the 1930s, these hand-drawn visuals were a response to the economic and political pressures that had begun to upbraid Japan’s party state. As the country turned increasingly militant, Japan’s already-long history and fascination with erotica thus became an intense exploration into the hedonistic, the sensationalist, the abnormal and taboo, reflecting not just newly-unearthed sensual desires but an eruption of extreme political change.

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/nsfw-guro-the-erotic-horror-art-of-japanese-rebellion

I think it’s important to recognize that the grotesque has its own beauty, and that’s very much a concern of mine in my art-making. I don’t personally feel that a fascination with the unsavoury and bizarre reflects on one’s mental stability. I’m writing that because (outside of ADM and my art-making communities of friends) I have been blatantly asked if I was mentally unstable due to the content of my art. I’m not, and I think that creating something that is bleak or disturbing can be a safety valve for the negative emotions that someone can experience in life, whether or not their experiences are regarded as objectively harrowing or merely a product of some self-induced angst.

Also, I haven’t even drawn anything verging on ero guro, which I would say is far more disturbing than my illustrations. However, since I am using body horror as a large trope in my project, I am going to be looking at more examples of ero guro. Not for the sake of merely being gross, though. (And I don’t find ero guro that gross either. I find the Saw franchise gross.) The reason why I am mining for disturbing imagery is because I want to find that line between the enchanting and disturbing – that is the line I want to play with. It would be unsophisticated to merely elicit disgust without accompanying fascination.

WIP illustrations

In chronological order, my drawing experiments for people with fingers growing out of their faces (to be explained in person, or in a future blog post). I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about the drawing style I’m going to use for my project and I’ve decided to go back to dotwork (thanks Beverley!).

Even if dotwork is slower, I reasoned to myself that my dotwork is astronomically better than my hatching and that I’d rather preserve the quality of my illustrations (that was the whole objective, right?). More medical weirdness coming soon – I think I have a much better idea of where I’m going now.

Focus

I have added a short text box to the top of my blog’s navbar to remind myself what issues I’m focusing on for FYP. I have quite the breadth of research especially with regard to my little explorations into pop culture and more contemporary looks and ideas but I was struggling recently trying to frame the project and narrow it down into something that can be accomplished in manageable pieces.

I am trying to base the project on topics I love, skill sets I enjoy using and strengths that I have with regard to art and design. I managed to crystallize this after talking to one of my favourite people.

The FYP is going to take the form of a book + set of collaterals (undecided for now) revolving around the narrative of a possibly psychosomatic disease that causes the growth of extra appendages. It’s heavily inspired by EB Hudspeth’s The Resurrectionist (which I will definitely acknowledge in my bibliography). The narrative will be framed through historical accounts of the disease’s occurrence in the 1800s (or perhaps earlier – one of my ideas is to bring in real historical events like the Salem Witch Trials and relate them to my fictional disease. For example a man with three eyes might have been burnt at the stake and accused of being a warlock. Here, I take my inspiration from The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks).

I am going to frame these historical accounts through the journal of a researcher who, as he traces the history of this unexplained and grotesque disease, finds himself exhibiting the symptoms, which leads to his journal descending from clinical objectivity into obsessive madness.

To bring in all my research on puzzle books I might make up potential cures to the disease written in cipher (inspired by the Voynich Manuscript which is apparently still unsolvable), which the reader has to solve. As a nod to my previous projects, some of the cures and symptoms of the diseases may strongly relate to mythology (i.e. a Castor & Pollux medicine brand, a man being regarded as the human avatar of the god Janus when he grows a second face). I may want to bring in myths about the body itself as well (i.e. the left hand does the devil’s work, Chinese face reading) to add richness to each historical account.

The point of all of this is to create a project that makes the reader think twice about any strange physical sensations they may experience – they may know that I made all of this up, but due to the framing of multiple ‘historical’ accounts through the lens of a researcher’s journal I want to make the story elements seem real, so that the moment someone’s arm starts itching they’re going to expect to grow a couple new fingers. Body horror is very compelling in pop culture and media and our fascination with the grotesque will underpin most of the motivations of this project. I’m actually looking forward to the research paper because that is where I can fully crystallize the objectives of this project. Under this larger umbrella I take my inspiration from Escher – his drawings may help me decide how I want to present these biological alterations.

In simple words, I want to tell a good story, and create visuals that are simultaneously grotesque and fascinating. The project may evolve again as I continue my illustrative groundwork (I am at present finding a visual style that is effective but also not so slow that it’s impractical to do).

Helen Friel’s The Imp Of The Perverse

A short story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of the Perverse discusses the voice inside all of us that makes us to do things we know we shouldn’t do. Each page is perforated in a grid system with sections of the text missing. Readers must follow the simple instructions to tear and fold specific sections to reveal the missing text. Books are usually precious objects and the destruction is engineered to give the reader conflicting feelings, do they keep the book in it’s perfect untorn form? Or give into the imp and enjoy tearing it apart?

from HelenFriel.com

I think I’m starting to get into a mild state of panic about what to do for FYP and how to go about producing a final work, so I’m looking at zany book designs to try and figure out what to do about what I’m going to do. I really like how Friel’s book design is spot-on for the book’s contents.

(I honestly don’t like the way the book is presented in the photos but these are the only ones available and I understand the concept well enough.)