Thursday, 24 November 2011

External Identity Crisis

As said repeatedly I'm sure, my work this year has been a result of my experience with leukaemia and the reactions from strangers I received when I was going through treatment. However, this series is the only one that directly references my illness. It's the result of the wee research project I did I while ago where I got students from my art school to write their opinions and reactions on a few portraits of myself I'd taken when I had just finished treatment but still had no hair. I absolutely loved the words that they had written on the photographs, but fell even more in love with them when I started playing around with how I was going to display them. I really wanted to cut into an actual dictionary and display the pages in the way that I have below, but books are my obsession and I just couldn't bring myself to cut into one, especially a dictionary! So I compromised. This framed 'dictionary', as I like to call it, is put together with photocopied pages of a dictionary I found in the cupboard. If I remember rightly, there are 13 or 14 pages. With each one I cut everything out of the page, except for the word that was written on the portrait, leaving in the columns and page numbers etc. 
I placed the pages on top of each other without really paying attention to which definition was where, with the exception being if one was completely hidden behind another; the result of which is actually quite interesting! One section in particular that I really like is where 'healthy' and 'cancer' are overlapping. Just that small thing explains exactly what I was trying to achieve with this work. Having the pages on top of one another and then placed within the confines of a frame is my way of bringing the opinions together, creating one entity and showing how these often contradicting opinions are about  one person. I'm not sure how the viewer would interpret the dictionary if it was displayed by itself, but when paired with the two portraits below, the meaning is more obvious.












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