For my personal study I will be exploring family and the relationships I have with the ones who I live with in Jersey and the ones who live in London, who include my parents and younger brothers. I originally lived in London until last year so my relationships have changed over the time I have been here, so I believe this would be a good topic for me to look into. Since most of my family live in London, there is some sort of disconnection between us as we don’t see each other as much as we did before, and the family who I live with in Jersey have closer relationships with me since I have moved over. Although Jersey is similar to the UK, it was still quite difficult getting used to the new areas and starting fresh at a new school, and my family in both London and Jersey were here to help me with that. During the occupation, family would have been the only thing the people of Jersey would have really had close to them, and they were still somehow able to connect with their loved ones who lived outside of the island even though communications were extremely limited.
I am planning to take 2 photo shoots before Christmas break and 2 during Christmas break, with three of them being in Jersey and one being in London. I’d like to take a look at my family in London and Jersey, and take images of them as they would be naturally in their daily lives to compare the differences of lives and relationships between the two.
For my Personal Investigation, I want to focus on my mobile family life and how this lifestyle has effected me as an individual. I will explore how living in different countries has allowed me to gain cultural knowledge, new experiences and memories. It has ultimately shaped who I am and how I perceive the world. Through childhood images, I want to highlight how grateful I am for the adventures I have had with my family and how they have encouraged me to continue traveling and exploring. The reason for this constant movement is because of my dad. His job as a teacher doesn’t involve travelling, however his boredom has urged him to live in different places with me and my mum.
For my photo-book to have a narrative, I will tell the story of how my mother and father met and fell in love in Peru. Since my father is a geography teacher, he takes the opportunity to go travelling whenever he can. Through applying to jobs in different countries, he ended up in Peru which is where he met my mother Isabel. I will present their love story through archival images and display highlights such as first moments together, the wedding day and when I was born. Afterwards, I want to explore my mixed identity and the different cultures I have been exposed to during childhood.
As the plan above explains, the narrative will start with archival images of my father and mother and their first encounters together as a couple. The middle section will contain archival images after I was born. It will be in chronological order and show how we moved from one country to another: Peru, Singapore, Austria, Thailand, Germany, Gran Canaria, England and Jersey. The final section could include digital photo-montages of self portraits to explore my current identity.
This mind map shows in a very general view, of how fashion and clothing affects our lives and essentially creates loops of high and low confidence and status, which feed themselves and are difficult to get out of. It also touches on social media and how it promotes potentially unnecessary clothes buying habits, and an artificial need to have nicer clothes to get more likes and attention.
Invisible Hands is an art exhibition which is a collaborative project between artist Alicja Rogalska and The Morning Boat in order to showcase life as a migrant worker. The exhibition is located at Jersey Art Centre in the Berni Gallery, and aims to inform viewers of the poor conditions these migrant workers are put through and how little they gain back, in terms of pay, housing and food. This topic is highly relevant as it has been a massive part of the Island’s agriculture for over 150 years, but still is an area which has not been explored or documented.
The Agri-Care Prize was created while interviewing the migrant about their working conditions and lives. The interviews were informal as they created clay potatoes to act as a symbolic representation for all migrant workers, whilst creating this they talked about what made a star worker and made a list of criteria as to how to decide who gets the prize of the potato. This is a highly important aspect of this exhibition as it reinforces how the migrant workers are forgotten about and not talked about much, reinforcing the theme of neglect. This set of rules and background is shown below, alongside the prize potato.
As mentioned before the migrant workers were interviewed, and this was put into a video, and was projected onto the wall. Within this video we watch these migrant workers told and create their potato out of clay with the audio of the migrant workers explaining the working conditions being played on top of this. One key element of the video is that no faces are shown, allowing the migrant workers to remain anonymous allowing them to express the issues and their personal opinion, reinforcing the title of ‘Invisible Hands’
The imagery of the exhibition was all captured by the migrant workers themselves in order to accurately represent their lifestyle and working conditions. This is showcased as many images are poor quality and show poor framing techniques which makes the images authentic and allows us to truly understand the conditions that they are in. All images were enlarged and framed and displayed on the wall. After looking at some imagery one key thing that stood out was that all imagery with the subject being people, the people all seemed happy and got on with their job and life as they don’t know any better emphasising this pejorative issue within the Channel Islands.
Personally, I believe this exhibition really illustrates how bad these migrant workers get it, allowing me as a viewer truly understand their working and living conditions. The work hold strong conceptual and contextual representations which makes the imagery and overall exhibition powerful in illustrating political and social issues, suggesting our government is corrupt. The authentic and naturalistic/documentary photographs produced really emphasised how real this issue is, exposing me to the issue and feeling a sense of sympathy and makes me want to help these migrant workers. The use of imagery and media has allowed me to gain further understanding of the concept and context, which has allowed me to consider using these techniques to showcase my concept and context within my personal study.
For my Personal investigation I will be focusing on my grandparents and the relationship that they had and how it developed and bloomed through and during the occupation of the island. They knew each other for years and they made their relationship official on liberation day.
I will be using a mixture of images, some being ones that I will get from archives both family and public, some images within the book will be ones that I have made and set up from stories that are in the book, they will be tableaux images that i have set up with two people in them representing both of my grandparents. They will be set up in places that they met.
Known as both an artist and art historian Jeff Wall is a Canadian photographer and writer whose work simultaneously showcases and challenges some of the most dominant assumptions about art and art-making. Wall’s early photograph shares qualities and themes with Conceptual art as well as aspects of appropriation art of the 1970s and 1980s, by investigating the assumed, required elements of fine art and borrowing narrative and visual details from outside the established art world genres.
Wall stages the scenes he photographs, intricately designing every detail to achieve his desired visual effects. Ironically, the final images often appear to be mid-action, spontaneous and candid moments. In Wall’s earliest photographs of the late 1970s and 1980s clear references are made to some of the most famous paintings in the history of art since the Renaissance. Wall admits nodding toward the titans of early modern painting such as Delacroix and Manet.
I have chosen to look at Jeff Wall as one of my artists for the way in which he stages his photographs but also for the way in which his photographs also focus on the surroundings as well as the people inside. The landscape and parts of the island relating to the legends is something I want to try to focus on slightly so have take Jeff Wall as a photographer to see how he takes and stages photographs without any people in to still make an impact and mean, show and hint at something without the use of people. I am going on to do a photoshoot of landscapes in the places that I want to centre the stories around, unlike Jeff Wall who stages the photographs to create his photographs I am going to be taking the photographs of the landscapes as they are however I have similar intentions.
Jeff Wall’s Work:
The Destroyed Room (1978)
The Destroyed Room from 1978 is one of Wall’s first and most iconic photographs. The work consists of a large photograph printed as a cibachrome transparency within a fluorescent Lightbox. Around 5 by 8 feet in size the work is both vivid and imposing. Offering a stark and intrusive view of a seemingly ravaged space the image forces the viewer to confront the destruction of items found within the typically intimate space of a bedroom. Visually we can see clothes are spilling out of the drawers of the wooden dresser, a bed is turned on its side with its pale green mattress slashed, possessions such as clothing and accessories are strewn about the floor and large pieces of the red wall are missing, exposing the pink insulation underneath.
With this photograph Wall first began making overt references to some of the most famous examples of classical painting from the 19th century. In The Destroyed Room, the large scale oil painting titled The Death of Sardanapalus, painted by Eugene Delacroix in 1827 is the source of inspiration. The Death of Sardanapalus depicts an act of violence that occurs, Wall shows an aftermath. Wall has purposely left remnants of the staging process of the scene in the final image, making the fabrication of the room obvious.
