After projecting into the gallery space the other week I realised that a large wide design is more possible than a tall one; being as the max height possible in that space is 3m.
So i decided to mess about with some ideas of a figure crouching.
I'm striving for an anti beauty aesthetic. A form that is sexualised but also visceral and folkloric.
I've been obsessed with the masks in the Wilder Mann, The Image of the Savage book by Charles Freger I acquired recently and so decided to incorporate some of them in my design. I want to create something that speak of our time right now, but summons something of the old. Like a reckoning, a grounding of the old gods and their magic in the mad and extraordinary times we live in currently. I really enjoyed how the rug being in two planes, both wall and floor allowed me to manipulate space. I want to try and carry this through with this new piece somehow. As above, the space being as is lends itself to a crouched figure, hands forward. So maybe it will be the digits that are glitched this time.
After lots of messing about and thinking, I started sketching this pig character. A pig feels correct. Because right now it is truer than ever that all animals are equal but some are more equal than others. I want a red hood as a nod to the handmaids tale; which by the way patriarchy, was supposed to be fiction and not an instruction manual.
After some research on stance, I decided that I wanted the character to have the multiplicity of Ron Muek's En Garde; both playful and threatening. Dynamic and paradoxical. The rugs large scale will add to the sense of threat, or rather vulnerability for audience anyway.
With fingers being so in the frame, I was minded of sailor tattoos. I had already been considering a pig and a rooster tattoo if feet were an option, because of the superstitious tradition that sailors had getting them inked on their feet as they believed it would help them survive a shipwreck. But hands it is this time, so the words hold fast seem appropriate. Plus they are both contranyms, so that's not only grammatically fun but adds another layer of depth to the piece.
If I wave glitched the hands, similarly to how I did the legs of my first bunny rug, then it was add even more depth to the lettering; as they would ironically become lost in a wave themselves.
Maybe that is the title of the piece.
It feels like we are a bit at sea at the moment. Hopefully kind shores will find us soon.
