Object: Critical Appraisal

Object: Self Reliance

I really struggled coming up with an idea for the object project. As still life isn’t something I really find all that interesting, it wasn’t easy to come up with an idea for it. I decided to start looking at things that were affecting me at the moment, and how I could show these through still life. Moving out for the first time, and becoming more independent, it gave me a lot to write about.

After struggling for the first few weeks with money, I decided to look into the struggles that face young students going to university, and how this is only going to get worse with the upcoming increase of tuition fees and the possibility of another recession.

A lot of still life paintings, especially around the 16^th century,  were inspired by the current economic climate of the country they were from. For example, Dutch and Flemish painters would paint flowers, usually rare/expensive ones, as owning these paintings were seen to be a sign of economic status.

As art progressed, still live moved into photography, still with some sort of political or economic reference behind the work. I looked at the work of Shomei Tomatsu, who is famous for his photographs showing the aftermath of the Nagasaki/Hiroshima bombings in 1945.  In particular, this image of the melted bottle is something I looked at in great detail.

To represent my new found independence and struggle with money, I chose to look at the change in foods I was eating. This was in part inspired by Andy Warhol’s piece “Campbell’s Soup Cans”. The repetitiveness of this piece was very relevant to my eating pattern, as I was practically living off of beans on toast for the first two weeks.  This was due to my struggle with money and adjusting to living alone.

My initial photograph was just of a can of beans standing on a plate with a toaster in the background, but this seemed to clean and not very representative of student life, so I decided to mess the plate and props up, by pouring beans everywhere, and half eating the toast.  My choice of lighting was meant to emphasize the loneliness of living away from home, and I did this by using a singular focused light source, throwing everything else into darkness.

I found this project very hard to connect with, and I really struggled to change my ideas into reality, and successfully communicate my intentions. This is something I really need to work on in the future, especially with still life in the studio, as it is hard to establish a context for your subject.