Street Performance

Overall, i found my experience of this day performance to the public, to be quite liberating. At first i interacted with members of the public who were aimlessly prowling Bute park, although i felt it was not appropriate to hand out anything to them as they were already interacting and embracing the natural world in their own right, just by being present in the park. So i took myself off to the streets of Cardiff centre and see how my interaction with the public would be interpreted. I started at the top end of the high street, near the more upper class shoppers, and this was quite a dive into adversity. majority of people i tried to talk to didn’t want much to do with me. it was interesting more on a social level, just how resilient people are to anything that is outside of their comfortable social bubble. it was quite intimidating at first, and i shied away from my task for a moment. The amount of refusals i received eventually allowed me to build up my confidence. As i worked my way through the streets, i came to Queen street, and there i found a thriving menagerie of persons upon the high street. as the hours passed, i could figure out who would be receptive and welcoming of my interaction with them and who wouldn’t. Due to the intensity of the heat and the amount i was wearing, i had to call it a day on the performance. But i’d handed out almost everything i had to hand out, which signifies a good performance where the public were willing to participate. The main thing i came away with from this experience was the dynamics of social interaction. The appropriate attitude needed when dealing with the assortment of persons you find on the street, you have to be gentle and delicate with your approach, you can’t be too intimidating, or else you burst their bubble of social safety. i cannot say weather or not i had much of a profound influence on anyone during my performance, but i hope that what they received from me, in the statement and the collages etc. was enough to provoke them just a little, to break away from the conventional habits of a consumer on the street. I suppose that’s the beauty of art, it’s always down to the individuals interpretation of the piece, and that’s what makes art so freeing and liberating to all that participate, it should be open and available to anyone who wishes to be a part of it. just as it was anyone’s choice during my performance to interact with me and my work.

Additional Handouts

In addition to the collages i made for my performance, i decided to produce small objects that could also be handed out. I thought it would be nice for the recipient of my performance, to also be given a small token of nature that they could interact with, during and after the performance. It’s something i had in mind at the start of this project, when i was looking at the Mundurucu’s spiritual beliefs, but my initial thought was to make small talismans of the natural spirits that i could hand out, so people could use them to reconnect with nature. Much like a lucky rabbits foot or a four leaf clover, if they had a token of nature, it could feed a message into their subconscious, the more they interacted with that object. So i came up with this idea of giving them nature in a container. Some soil, leaves, sticks and moss. A mini habitat for them to experience while making their way through the concrete city streets.

Mini Collages

These are 18 small collages i produced for my performance piece. I decided that the performance itself would not be enough and i wanted something more long lasting for the public to be connected to. As well as these collages, i’ve made four small jars of dirt and grass, five pouches of dirt and grass, and three small baskets, each containing a flower. All these items will be accompanied with an envelope that includes a small statement i wrote for the participants of the performance to read and reflect upon. I’m hoping that this ill all assist my piece and make it a memorable experience for all.

The small statement is as follows:

Hello,

I am a second year Fine Art student practicing at CardiffMet. As part of my study on humans and our intimate and perhaps waning connection to the natural world, I have composed this performance to present to the public. My aim is to transform myself into a spiritual translator of the natural world. It is easy to get caught up in all the sham drudgery of the everyday, and we are now so used to grey concrete tones, commercialism and mass consumption, that I feel we have begun to lack any real respect or appreciation of where this all came from. I hope that you will allow all but five minutes of your day, to take the time to think about how beautiful the world can be. How mysteriously and intrinsically exquisite the natural world is. Listen to the birds, embrace the vibrant green display of the trees, think of all the wondrous earth that lies beneath your feet. And be grateful that you are able to experience such an extraordinary place, and it’s all right here at your fingertips. The earth needs our help, to protect it and in return it will sustain our species and many others for years to come. Please be kind, be gentle, be loving, for we are all connected to this mesmeric and empowering planet.

Thank you

Man and Nature

As a statement piece, i created a tryptic that would totally embrace my recent explorative theme towards mans relationship with the natural world. i’ve said before that i wanted to examine it from a darker light, and delve into the darker side of my theme. I think these pieces are very effective and powerful. I wanted them to have a dominance over the viewer, and also make it relatable, using core emotions and basic elements of nature. Man is imposing himself upon nature, but nature is still resonant within us and will always be, to the point where it will become the dominant one. Hence the overflow of nature in the central face. I also think this work ties in well with my accompanying collages which works cohesively as a collection of work, but would also stand alone successfully.

This is a canvas i painted and collaged, that would link to the rest of my collage work. But i wanted to work on a larger scale to get a variation of perspective and sense of impact. I still incorporated techniques i’ve been using throughout this subject. I tried to keep the landscape instinctive and lush, so it could be placed anywhere in the world, as well as the dominance of man. There’s no specifics, other than the imagery used to direct the message to the viewer. I don’t think it’s as powerful as i would have hoped, perhaps there’s too much going on in one painting. But i hope that it can assist in enforcing the poignancy of my message, in relation to the collage work i’ve done.

Collages Continued

These are the collages i feel are most effective and work successfully together to encompass my theme of man’s relationship with nature. I wanted to lean more towards an ominous aesthetic as i began to focus on our modern interaction with nature, in terms of industrial exploitation and corruption of the natural lands. I wanted there to be this fearsome interjection of the two parties, and their ongoing conflict to coincide. My earlier collage work was based more on the sacrifice of the ‘spirits’ of nature. This was in relation to my research into ‘Shinto’ and the Mundurucu tribe, two very different cultural backgrounds that shared the same respect for the natural world as a result of their relationship with the spirits they believed inhabited the lands. I think that keeping in with a colour theme allowed these images to all work together, they are quite imposing but hopefully still allows for interpretation from the viewer. I wanted to be more bold with the power of my images, rather than pussy foot around my theme and be too romantic about it. Seeing as my initial inspiration was a trophy head from the Mundurucu tribe, it seemed only fitting to indulge in a more imposing approach to my message. We are a dominant species, we pride our selves in our technological and industrial evolution, but at what cost? The earth will always be more dominant, and therefore i wanted to depict this ongoing jar between our two challenging worlds.