Group flyers

by ying0jiang

Poster Experiments

by helen608

      

Some Questions

by helen608

Killian – In your representation of yourself you are crossing the boundaries from private into public, do you feel any fear in this?

Ying – You seem to appear as a ghost in the video you made, and as you are working from the perspective of a lover how do you feel about  the self blindness  someone may feel while in love?

Rui – You appear to have a strong connection to your subconsciousness, do you see this as a desired state of mind?

The Brotherhood

by helen608

Our golden band is her cage, her duties and expectations form the bars. She is a wife and a mother: a thing of beauty, a creature of obedience. We have tamed and trapped her and thus she is ours. We goad her with raspberries, a healthy pregnancy.

The Virgin is the highest type of female excellence. We give her white garments, ensuring she upholds their purity. We thrust lilies at her, chaining her to chastity. We press cherries hard into her delicate hands, modest beauty, immaculate.

This girl who buds must be torn into flowering. We loose her clothes, we wet her lips. We give her pomegranate, their seeds tell of her blossoming fertility. She is our maiden ready for marriage, ready for us.

For she who is fallen must be forced to rise. We give her blackberries, sorrow, spiritual neglect.  We wait for her atonement. We throw our rosary beads at her, our prayers and good faith. We hold her down at the water, coerce her into the inevitable cleansing.

Cindy Sherman, History Portraits

by helen608

Our Collective

by helen608

We are exploring vision and representation.
Discovering how to make visible a feeling, an element of femininity, an essence of ourselves.

“We belong to you” – The Females of The Brotherhood

by helen608

My work channels female presence through the vision of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood.

The women depicted are imprisoned within this gaze; they are hidden underneath the role they play, veiled by the symbolism thrown over them. Their hair is their femininity – it is a tool often used by the Brotherhood to chain a woman to her designated character, a visual representation of the actual spirit within. Yet it can also be used by the women, in the act of freeing themselves.

I am undertaking the role of the male within my project, positioning these women as the male gaze desires it. I give them fruit and staged objects, dictate how the figures are seen through the symbolism of these props. The women react differently to the vision that holds them captor – some openly defy it, while others seem content to exist as they are told. Some destroy the fruit, they turn their backs, use their hair to hide their faces, others embrace their position as a character.

The images depict various stages of females reacting to the roles in which they are placed.

The Damsel in Distress

by helen608

For the damsel in distress shoot I used pink flowers which symbolise gratitude and blueberries which symbolise protection. Again I was working with the idea of hiding her face so any individuality is lost and all that remains is the role prescribed to her. Unfortunately I am not happy with the results of this and will have to reshoot. I wanted to tangle the models hair up in the brambles and gorse bushes to represent the notion of her existing in entrapment, waiting for her heroic knight to rescue hair. However the hair was very soft and thin and not right for what I was trying to do with it. The female needs to appear helpless, unable to do anything about her predicament which is in actuality very easy to get out of. I was also experimenting with squashing the blueberries again keeping with the idea that this shows some motion on the females part of freeing herself from her role within the image. I will be trying the shoot again with a model with thicker hair and hopefully will achieve the images that I want.

‘The female body thirsts for the words of a man’

by helen608

An article I found in a magazine..

Wife, Mother, Caged Bird

by helen608

   

Here I have retried my very first shoot for this project when I was attempting to draw relations between the the woman as a wife and mother and the idea of this role being similar to a caged bird. After the first shoot I was dissatisfied with the photos as I found them flat and boring, I much prefer the ones in this series. In most of the images I ensured the woman’s face is hidden from view so that she is represented not by any defining personal features but by her hair and the surroundings. In Pre Raphaelite paintings hair worn loose is a sign of female sexuality, I have used this element here rather then having the models hair tied up in tight, repressed bun to create an idea that she is destroying from within this role under which she has been placed. This is the same with the squashing of the raspberries, I have heard that they can be symbolic of a healthy pregnancy, I have shown them held in hands that are encaged both by the metal bars and their shadows emphasising the lack of choice a Victorian wife had of being a mother. There is also ivy present in some of the images – ivy symbolisies eternity.