Dough as flesh

I’ve had illness after illness, crisis after crisis, including writing my dissertation which has taught me how easily you can become a hermit when there’s so many words to write. 🙂 These images are some more experiments, baking and experimenting how dough could be flesh. I’ve also been doing some writing apart from my dissertation which I’ve put a little glimpse of below. Let me know what you think, I love hearing others thoughts. 🙂

Just one thing stands between us.
Part mother, part child, part other.
Like the spare pastry left once the gingerbread child has been cut out. All that holds us together seems to be the apron strings tied above my waist.

Jasmine Gauthier

The Kitchen as a Womb Experiments

Here we have a selection of some of my experiments so far this term from looking at the kitchen and especially baking as a way of conceptualising the creation of a child. Let me know what you think, I’d love some feedback. 🙂

Bed of Leaves

Walking away from our past,
Let us follow our darkest fear,
Swept off my feet by the wind,
Blowing between your branches,
Silky jaws lap and tear me apart.

Embrace me, branches.
I return once more.
Light has failed.
Children play in echoes;
Vegetation.
Asphyxiated on your perfume.
On every leaf your scent is caught.
Burrowing under the past,
only resurfacing to catch my breath.

Exaggerated whispers keep me
Running, I want to
grow, I want to
entwine with your wooded arms.
My eyes fail and that doesn’t
worry me a second.
Music plays, my ears burn.
Every few miles there is
a shelter built from wood.
Your flesh so starlight,
It’s worth every try.

I always thought that someone would make
you happier. I was wrong.
Fuse me with the trees:
you blew me away with gusts.

My fingers become bark,
seized completely; you seize the night.
Let me drown in night,
it’s the only way I can feel you.

Silky jaws of beasts,
slicing my mind to tatters.
I’ll follow you forever.
The trees glow when I cry,
Illuminated in the moonlight.
The leaves turn red and
the forest begins to take me.
Cooing me, lulling me
into your web.

I’m not the man I used to
be, but I’m not the
man I want to be yet.
Bury my body and never tell a soul,
I’m alone in the ice. Come find me,
Rain on me.

Your nails run down my legs,
Digging deeper with every stroke.
Bones push up the ground.
Fingers clasp my tendons.

I want to lie in your bed
of leaves, let me
be immersed in your
world, let me become
one with you, my love.

It’s been a while since I felt,
Water seep into my feet.
The rage of the wind in
the trees hits my
chest and darling I’m
short of breath. I’ve been
walking to find your heart.
I’ll follow you all my life.

Flesh and bone,
Curling petals,
Witnessing your Spring
Suffering the chill air.
Let me open the door again.
Heavy footing on soft soil.
Your darling face is my obituary.

Dripping leaves, Soaking floor,
Slithering down my mind.
Rabbits run, Badgers fall,
Sweet and wild, untamed
Your hair is caught
It whispers words,
Echoed memories, laughs from birds,
Willow, birch, beach and silver,
The friction burn inside my chest.
The ground calls for me
I lay down and sink.
I become the leaves of my bed.

 

I wrote this last term as part of an experimental web project which isn’t quite complete. I thought I should probably start posting my creative writing on here as well as it’s a big part of my experiments/practice now. My favourite part is the last stanza, everytime I read it I love it more and more. 🙂

Let me know what you think!

David Hockney RA Exhibition

I had the delightful opportunity to see Hockney’s new exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’m a big fan of Hockney, not all of his work but I feel he has something like no one else especially in regards to the photographic. His portraits are my favourites so as you can imagine I was slightly worried going to an exhibition of his made up solely of landscapes. However, I should never have worried as there were so many surprises.

I’d studied Hockney’s early work at school, especially being fascinated by a book in our library of his photo collages which after seeing a few times became a gimmick. Yet to be confronted with an image I had picked apart so much let me relive that first discovery. That first moment where you realise what he has done. It was wonderful.

I realise the exhibition has been blogged and spoken about by anyone and everyone but I’d like to use this opportunity just to say what jumped out to me the most. In this piece above his use of colour to push you away from others yet keep to the naturalness of the scene is genius. The delicate pink of the flowers in the shadows of the trees and the red orange of the leaves and earth in the light work beautifully together for example. I’m intrigued by his use of 6 canvases in one, when in the exhibition for me they just worked so well. Splitting up the painting like his previous photo collages yet never disturbing the eye. Amongst seemingly natural paintings were ones like the first I have listed on this blog where he moves between fantasy and the real, almost Van Gogh, back to the psychadelic sixties… it was something refreshing.

Walking into the Spring Room you are confronted with two large walls covered in beautiful prints of Hockney’s iPad drawings/paintings, I was spellbound by these. Walking up and down, walking closer and further away. They are at once completely and totally Hockney and yet you are still drawn back to the tool itself. Muchlike all hockney’s work, I like looking at them at a distance. I’m more concerned with the composition, use of colour and form in the paintings as opposed to the brushstrokes and the actual creation of the paintings.

The biggest surprise and probably my favourite element of the exhibition was Hockney’s use of moving image. You walked into a large dark room with 3×6 screens, where hockney had attached 9 cameras to his assistant’s car and had moved through the landscape slowly at different times of year. The cameras aren’t completely ligned up like his collages and so there is a disjointed relationship with the tracking of the movement and yet it is the best sense of 3D I’ve ever come across. It works a lot more like our eyes in that our eyes are not like cameras who can only focus on one view but have peripheral vision and can see much further. The silence of the video is haunting but works beautifully as the snow falls or the wind blows. He also had another surprise as with these landscapes he made some films in his studio with the same technique. I’m a big fan of dance, especially tap dancing and there was a fantastic tap dance routine with dancers in his studio where the bodies of the dancers were pulled and pushed together with the different viewpoints. It was like watching paint come together on a canvas before your eyes.

So there you have it, one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen in a while. Definitely worth negotiating the crowds.

Pregnancy Series Continued VII (On Location with the Women II)

It’s about a week before I have to have all my images up on the wall and today was the last shoot before that. The girls were wonderfully co-operative and we managed to get the shoot done in an hour which was an achievement in itself. The images above are just a snippet of today’s shots, none of them are touched up or anything but I thought I’d share them with you all.

You’ll get the final line up etc in the near future. 🙂

Pregnancy Series Continued V (On Location with the Women)

So here is the first shoot of hopefully a few more of my pregnancy series without a name yet, I was focusing more on the interactions between the women, leaving some to their own devices and others where I intervened. These are just some rough shots to add to my growing collection of content. Photographing such a large group outside, especially with the weather like it was, was a challenge but good fun.

Tell me what you think, of the project as a whole so far or of these images in particular, I love getting feedback.

Pregnancy Series (Nasharie)

So if any of my readers follow me on twitter, you will know that I have just begun a project that is a study of pregnant women.

So for starters, if anyone is reading this and knows of any pregnant women in the UK (I’m willing to travel within reason so check with me)! I’m really friendly and I can’t believe how excited I am about this project.

Pregnancy, birth and children are a massive part of me, which might sound strange to some as I’m only 20 and feel nowhere near ready for having children. However, doing this project makes me feel so alive, so excited, to know that these women are holding a beautiful precious thing. I’m interested in the waiting with pregnancy, that there is a deadline as such… then the anticipation as well as the anxiety, essentially I’m interested in starting off documenting all these emotions, then I will see how it goes from there.

My main concern/interest at the moment is getting experience of photographing pregnant women and eventually photographing groups of pregnant women because I think there’s something unusual to photograph in that. So yes, here’s a little taster of what I’ve been photographing on my first shoot of the project. The beautiful Nasharie…

Mauritius #2: A Rough Edit

So as promised, here is a snippet of the 4000 photographs I took whilst I was away, they follow around the theme of being an island, being isolated, being alienated from everything and everyone. It’s about that reaching out from an island to connect to others and other objects. Hope you like them, tell me your thoughts.

Brothers – Behind the Scenes

Another post about behind the scenes content, these are some images I took a little over a year ago, so many of you will recognise them but I’ve added some behind the scenes content for some fun. These images were more from a series I started (and am still continuing) about family and fiction, what is on the surface and what is beneath.

I’m still away in Mauritius, this is another scheduled post so don’t expect a rapid reply!

Behind the scenes photographs of the above shoots, plus a video at the end.

Thanks for reading/watching/looking, means a lot.

Lydia on the Bronica

I’m getting a lot more practice with my Bronica this summer, so continuing to photograph the wonderful lydia. These photographs were taken in an afternoon catching up on the few months that we hadn’t seen one another. Using the Bronica has proved to be a tricky thing, not least because it’s fairly heavy and always needs a sturdy tripod but for the focusing. When you are focusing, there’s more distance between your eye and the viewfinder because it is so large and you are looking at it at an angle which does all sorts to my head. I’m pretty glad with how these turned out, but they are fresh and untouched as such and I am without a darkroom to create my own prints at the moment. Hopefully in the near future when I start university again. I’d love to keep photographing Lydia for our whole lives, and I have no doubt I probably will. There are more photographs coming your way but I wanted to just select a few for today.

Finally got round to processing this film I took on a roadtrip up to Scotland last summer, this is taken in Bradford actually on the way. I’m obsessed by car parks, so shoot me!