Dealing With Myself (the presentation)

As an assignment we were made to do a presentation about our work and our current projects and, seeing as the new page for Dealing with Myself has just gone live on the website, I thought this may be a good opportunity to share with you what I wrote as a script for my presentation. It is quite lenghty, but for anybody interested in knowing a bit more about me and my work I think it may interested you in reading it.

Hope you enjoy (and please do excuse my American spelling in this one, sorry UK folks).

“Hello everybody

My name is Lily and I am currently a MA student of fine art and art history here at Aberystwyth university.

For the past 2 years in my undergraduate I have specialized in photography and have decided to continue to do so in my MA as well.

 My photography projects have dealt with personal subjects to me this latest one being as you can see the most personal as I myself am the main focus of it.

Before we get there though I would like to briefly look over my past projects and how they have all lead up in one way or another to what I currently working on.

I feel this is necessary especially considering my particular method of creating my works.

My particular style for photography started developing in my first semester of second year of my undergraduate degree when I developed my first official photography project entitled still life.

At the time I was using 35 mm black and white film with which I created fake double exposures in the printing process by overlaying film stills I had taken.

The process started really by accident, but I guess it was certainly a happy accident as it felt like I had found an interesting style to follow for my work.

Moving forward with my work I became more interested in portrait photography and taking photos of other people became the main focus of my projects.

So for my second project of second year, I chose to combine my portraiture of friends and acquaintances with my experimental fake double exposures, but this time using 35mm color film and digital manipulation rather than an analogue method as I didn't really have access to the appropriate equipment.

This led to the creation of my project hidden which dealt with in a general sense the relationship between the fragility of masculinity and the expectations of society on men and masculine people.

 This project would put me on track to what I would be doing in my third year and final project for my BA.

My final project A space of our own became this sort of culmination for this style of mine except in the final step I moved entirely to digital photography as it facilitated me in the number of pictures I needed for the project and the digital process as a whole.

A Space of our own became the real expression of not only this style I had developed over the past 2 years, but also the themes I had been researching during this time.

 My projects up to this point had been about more vague concepts and aesthetics up to this point rather than based around a serious researched theme, but for this project I wanted to base it on something that I knew would be personal to me.

The portraits I was taking were of LGBTQ people who I either knew personally or had responded to posts I had made on social media to find volunteers for my project. At first I took pictures of anybody willing to participate, but I eventually narrowed down the scope to mainly focus on trans, non-binary, gender fluid or gender non-conforming people.

So, combining my photographic style and the pictures of the wonderful people I was meeting I started creating these unique colorful spaces for them in order to showcase the diversity of these people who often are underrepresented in media, misunderstood or just categorized under one big (often wrong label) label.

Eventually the project for me started to become not only a way to meet new people in my local community but also come to a final stage of acceptance of myself.

 I had been tying to figure out for some time what exactly gender meant to me, it has always been and still is a complicated subject for me I never really felt like I fit in to any boxes and through this project I wanted a way to include myself amongst these real live tangible people that I had met who are so proud to be who they are. I wanted to be proud and confident of who I am myself as well.

 So as a final piece for the first time I turned the camera on me and added myself to project. Unfortunately, the big reveal of the project this sort of coming out through my work didn't exactly go as planned due to the well let's call the "unfortunate events" of 2020, but nevertheless the project was done and I had included myself successfully and my BA was over.

So now I entered the world slightly unfulfilled and I found myself ready to start the next project as a portrait photographer in the middle of a pandemic. Brilliant.

Going into my MA it started to be a little uncertain where exactly I was going to take my work from here, after having done two project which involved being in close contact with other people it was frustrating to have to find another mode of operation.

Initial ideas were to try landscape or street photography both genres I have experimented with before, but I couldn't think of the right way to spin my style of them and my ever-growing anxiety of the outside world wasn't helping.

So, I decided it may be time to experiment a bit with my style, get out of my comfort zone and so I turned my attention towards the most immediately available model at my disposal: myself.

Even though I had included myself in my last project and have definitely taken the selfie here and there, being the person in front of the lens was not something I was used to, and it took a lot of research and practice to figure things out not only from a technical point of view but from a stylistic one as well. It started with the concept of wanting to combine myself with my artwork literally: using photography and illustration combined which are the two mediums i practice in the most.

 I thought that for a change I would use my digital drawings as the overlays for the base images, it I was unsure how I wanted to do this.

Following my past projects, I thought that I wanted to keep those bright vibrant colors since it has been something i was always praised for in last work, but the more I worked with myself the more I realized just how different I viewed myself from the way I viewed others when taking their pictures.

As most of us have had to do, I was stuck having to deal with myself for maybe the first time a lot during lock downs and I'll admit it wasn't as easy as it sounds.

 I may have been expecting a different outcome when I first stepped into this but working with yourself makes you have to confront yourself inside and out as well, so I guess in the end the project is about me really, my relationship with myself and with my existence.

Fears, anxieties, dysmorphia, dysphoria, all on display in front of me and having to examine how I really see myself and what it feels like to be inside my brain.

From a stylistic point of view this work in progress project is definitely the most different so far with the limited color palette and having to actually decide myself what kind of overlays to create rather than relying on the digital manipulation of photos of plants and flowers that I've taken, it's a bit of a different process but I still try to keep the vaguely natural elements in there as well even if they are sort of distorted and abstracted, reduced to simple line drawings. I guess in this context it feels more fitting as it is completely me, my self-portrait and my drawings which are technically also unique to my style and myself, a signature of sorts.

As far as research for this particular project it has been a collage of all sorts of artists ranging from well-known portrait photographers such as Jane Bown, Diane Arbus and Francesca Woodman who worked mainly in traditional black and white analogue formats,

 to a more cinematic surrealist side with David Lynch and Gregory Crewdson examining the subversion of the normal and the everyday

 and even from suggestions of my tutors a look into the psychedelic animation such as The Yellow Submarine as a classic example and on my own I researched Midnight Gospel as a modern take on the psychedelic surreal animated style.

I think though my biggest inspirations so far though have been mostly some more contemporary portrait and self-portrait photographers: Juno Calypso, Flora Borsi and Carla van de Puttelaar and Zanele Muholi. Whom all create these fantastic and staged worlds and feelings through they portrait and self-portrait work.

The project is still a work in progress, and honestly, I could change by the time I'm done with it just as easy as I shift so can this as well.

 I'd say that yes it has been slightly mentally exhausting just as a lot of things have been this past year, but maybe that's the point. I'm dealing with myself the best I can, turning the things I don't know how to say in words into my art as I've always tried to do.

The project is about me and facing myself for better or for worse, I guess I'll just have to see where it takes me and what's to come.

Well Thank you for listening, hope you enjoyed.

Please feel free to ask me any further questions.”

-LAS xo