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.

Cameos

These two images are the only ones in this series. They were a wee experiment/play with the idea of the cameo or relief. Again, the facial features have been removed to allow the viewer to use their imagination to form an identification of the subject, and the jewellery has also been emphasized to add to the information presented to the viewer. As I said, these came into being when I was playing with some images on my computer, so the concept behind them isn't very defined, but I really like the aesthetic..

Abbey Proctor, 2011, Cameos [digital photographs]

Colour Cutouts

This series consists of 4 images, each of a different person and each with the same aesthetic idea; the face blocked in with a colour pulled from the subjects clothing. The photographs explore the importance of the physical identity of a person and how that is expressed by way of clothing, accessories and colour. Since the facial features have been totally filled in, the emphasis is placed onto the clothing somewhat contradicting the idea I'm addressing about not judging a book by it's cover, but I quite like the aesthetic of this series.

Abbey Proctor, 2011, Untitled smokey blue [digital photograph]

Abbey Proctor, 2011, Untitled red [digital photograph]

Cutouts

Towards the middle of the year (which meant mid-year critique), my work started to go down a more abstract road and these were the first of the cutouts. I found these quite fun due to the fact that there is very little information about the subjects present in the photographs. The viewer's imagination really needs to get thinking. I do think I had more fun and liked these more because of the aesthetic, rather than what they said as a series though..

Abbey Proctor, 2011, Untitled pink cutout #1 [digital photograph]

Abbey Proctor, 2011, Untitled pink cutout #2 [digital photograph]

Abbey Proctor, 2011, Untitled pink cutout #3 [digital photograph]