She was born in 1963 and is an English conceptual artist, she’s won the annual British fine arts award and the 1997 Turner Prize.  In 2007 she was elected as a lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.  Gillian Wearing (2016).

Wearing make self portraits going back in time to when she was 3 years old, Self-portrait at Three years old (2004), but she also models in masks of her family members and takes self portraits as them too.  She does this with elaborate silicone recreations of their faces and except for the gaps around the eyes they are quite convincing.

Gillian Wearing: Self-portrait at Three years old (2004)

According to Alastair Sooke writing in the Telegraph in 2012  Wearing has a fascination with artificial things, portraits and masks, which became a video and the series masks, The point of the masks in the Family series, was according to The Guardian (2012),  to have been to make a collection of herself and family members’ portraits all at about the same age (17), apart from grandparents.

I have to admit I’m baffled by why the artist takes these self-portraits. I understand the technical challenge and logistics of the makeup and the fact that they are almost in repeatable as the mask quickly degenerate. I can see is she is exploring how she is in relation we family and her past self. Are the images narcissistic, perhaps not in the traditional sense but in how they draw attention to her and her family?

References

Sooke, A. (2012). Gillian Wearing: Everyone’s got a secret. [online] Telegraph.co.uk. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/9149522/Gillian-Wearing-Everyones-got-a-secret.html [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

the Guardian. (2012). Gillian Wearing takeover: behind the mask – the Self Portraits. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/mar/27/gillian-wearing-takeover-mask [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

En.wikipedia.org. (n.d.). Gillian Wearing. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Wearing [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

(born 29 April 1972) is a Finnish photographer and video artist specializing in self-portraits and landscapes.  Elina Brotherus. (2016)

Brotherus project Annunciation is about the hope and heartache of the fertility treatment she was undergoing, and which she has documented through her photographs, displaying the emotions felt as time and time again there was hope and then was found to be unsuccessful.  Relating back to part 2 she illustrates the unseen elements of time through the extracts of a year on page calendars (2008-12) and her changing haircut and style.  The final images indicate she has given up hope and this is the end.

Another of her series available here is, Model Studies, in which she gives her insight into the role of the subjects’ gaze in self-portraiture, where again she is the model.  Out of the all the images we can only see her eyes directly in one, however, she is still able to communicate to and direct the viewer.

Both these project are very different; Annunciation is highly a personal work and her nakedness implies fragility and closeness to the biological reality of the reasons behind IVF treatment she was undergoing. Model Studies is different it not as personal and she seems to be using nudity as the simplest form of the subject.  However, why is she using this nudity to “invite quiet contemplation” perhaps it is to illustrate that we almost expect female nudity in pictures and therefore she challenging us to look past to nudity to the reasons why the images were taken.

Annunciation stands on it own without text, although it has accompanying text, you can see that this about a woman fight to become pregnant. However, Model studies the intention is less obvious and it has limited accompanying text allowing in Bartherian term the viewer to draw their own conclusions.

References

En.wikipedia.org. (n.d.). Elina Brotherus. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elina_Brotherus [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

Elina Brotherus. (n.d.). Photography. [online] Available at: http://www.elinabrotherus.com/photography [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

Francesca Woodman in her short life produced over 500 self-portraits, and when I first saw her work I thought she was very daring, showing so much of herself both physically and emotionally.

Her pictures were often shot in deserted buildings, using mirrors and blurred movements to evoke feelings of being and not being there, kind of a ghostly exhibitionist. What was she trying to say?  Was she being narcissistic?  Immediately I’m drawn to think she wanted attention, but for some reason here personality was holding her back, she did hence was hiding in her technique.  She wanted to be naked, but she didn’t want to show herself.

Francesca Woodman, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, © Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman, Tate Modern

Bright, (2010) states,  “It is difficult not to read Woodman’s many self-portraits – she produced over five hundred during her short lifetime – as alluding to a troubled state of mind. She committed suicide at the age of twenty-two.”

 However, her mother Betty in an interview with The Guardian, Cooke, R. (2014), expressed an opposite opinion,  “You can reinterpret her pictures if that’s your point of view. But I don’t think that was there. Everybody was tied in knots about politics in the 70s, but she wasn’t interested.” She goes on to say Francesca wasn’t a“deeply serious intellectual”; she was witty, amusing and “she had a good time,”. Betty goes on to say Francesca’s “life wasn’t a series of miseries. She was fun to be with. It’s a basic fallacy that her death is what she was all about, and people read that into the photographs. They psychoanalyse them…  Why did she put herself in the images? Francesca once said that it was just a matter of convenience: she was always available, whereas finding a model would take time.”

So can we say that there is evidence to support Bright’s comments? We can all psycho-analyse events after the fact and read into them whatever, we think and parents imparticular in a situation like Francesca Woodman’s will try to look away from the fact that her legacy i.e. her photographs pointed to something they missed.

Woodman’s pictures are dark and they are conveying unseen feeling perhaps of repression, but we can never know if that was truly how she felt – those closest to her believe the suicide was impulsive brought on by her own perceived failure as an artist not deep-rooted depression.

References

Cooke, R. (2014). Searching for the real Francesca Woodman. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

The open page of section 3 contains a triptych by fellow OCA student Keith Greenough and I am immediately drawn to it. I like the idea of multi-image portraits that show the different sides to people life. I this case there is a story, you look and see a guy that keeps fit; then you see of triathlon and on 3^rd look, you see ironman – which is a big step up in commitment.

The poses are identical in each short and other than Keith himself the only other consistent prop is his red Polar HRM watch – which again ties back to commitment and this is illustrating his lifestyle.

Many self-portraits can be narcissistic however, I don’t feel that here and also for me the images work without any need for caption or text.

References

Open College of the Arts (2015) Context & Narrative: course handbook. (2015). Barnsley: OCA