Mars project

To kick start our idea development after the Easter holidays we were set a joint "MARS" project with the Lens Based media pathway of the course.

"Mathematics, Art, Religion and Science are the four cornerstones of our cognitive understanding. They have drive us to search into the depths of the heavens and have propelled us forward in our need to understand why?"

In this project we were encouraged to look at all our research collectively thus far and consider how we could apply or extract Mathematical, Artistic, Religious, and Scientific modes/methods/meanings to or out of our work.

There were four of us in my group, including three Lens Based Media students and one Graphics student (me). We looked at our themes side by side in order to find common ideas within them so that we could produce one or more mini outcomes.

One person in our group had the theme "Colour and Anxiety" and we thought that it went quite well with my theme of "Fantasy verses Reality". We therefore decided to mainly go with those two themes thinking about how they might work together in a visual way whilst also keeping in mind the other two students topics of "Lost and found" and "Theories".

We came up with the idea of maybe having a girl who suffers from anxiety being the main character in this project's narrative. With the occurrence of a story, we thought that it might be appropriate to do an animation. Our final idea was to set the scene for the animation in a dark woodland where the girl is seen being over crowded by trees, representing the oppressive nature of her anxiety.

This then reminded me of an image I once took whilst on a walk in my local park (see bellow).

The reason I like this image was because of the interesting reflection of the surrounding woodland on the water and the relationship between this and the dull looking mud. I interpret this image as a sort of portal into another world. The reflective nature of the water along with the light seems to create this heavenly or even holy atmosphere from which the view might interpret the reflected image as an insight into parallel universe that is perhaps better than the one from which the photograph is taken.

This lead me to think of the work of John Stezaker who's work includes collaging classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations to give old images a new meaning. The majority of John Stezaker’s collages seem to create the impression that there is a world within a world, transporting the viewer into another dimension through the negative spaces within the images that almost act as chasms or tunnels. 

In his piece Mask xxxv (seen on the right) although the post card could be interpreted as preventing the viewer from seeing into the world of the woman, it could be seen as a visual illustration of her thoughts.

We as the viewer are able to see what she sees, images that literally could be in front of her or what she thinks awaits her in the future.

In Underworld III, positioned precisely to match the contour of the top of the film star’s head, a silhouette cut from a painting of birds and bats in flight obscures the woman’s face, neck and central body. The juxtaposition of the found images and the starlet and twilit creatures within them is summarised by its title Underworld III and the title’s inference of a covert other-worldliness, in which the viewer becomes enveloped

. Much of the found imagery that Stezaker chooses to work with was produced as promotional and advertising material for films made during the middle decades of the twentieth century. As such, this imagery takes its place replete with the pop culture glamour, most notably the intense styling, of its period. This allure then ‘time travels’ through the art of John Stezaker, arriving before the contemporary viewer as representative of an earlier age- and one whose iconography, exotica, poignancy, eroticism and cultural temper are heightened with time, yet oddly destabilised by the artist’s interventions into the image. The silhouette of the additional person is almost like a portal into another world. The scene could perhaps illustrate her visions for the future as she gazes into the distance contemplating life. The title Underworld III in itself suggests an additional world behind the initial photographic portrait and thus further implies that this gap in the image leads off into another world which could be either in the past, present or future.

This also relates to the work of M.C Escher an artist I looked at just before we started the MARS project. His work includes intricately detailed illustrations that focus on illusions and the transformation of one image into another.




Escher's illusions make the viewer question the validity of what they see before them. This image was particularly relatable to my photograph and the notion of being transported into another world e.g. from fantasy into reality or visa versa.











Both Stezaker and Escher made me think about other ways I could look at my title. It isn't just about the obvious images of fantasy or reality that you might see in illustrated children's books but it could also be about making the viewer question what they see. It could be transforming one image into something else maybe through the merging of two. For example the picture on the right could be seen as combination of two images. The image in the crystal ball could be a reflection or is might be a window allowing the person who is holding it up/ the viewer insight into a parallel universe. It therefore makes them question what in the image is fantasy and what is real. In my images/patterns/prints that I produce in the duration of my project I hope to make the viewer question their perception of these two concepts and create visuals that don't just illustrate the common images associated with Fantasy and Reality.

As I am not very good at animating, I decided to leave that up to the rest of the people in my group and we decided that I could do a poster describing our concept. 

For the top image I used a photograph I had taken previously of woodland and layered it on photoshop with a watercolour image I painted. I also edited the photograph of woodland to make it darker and creepier looking, helping to portray the dark emotions the girl will be feeling as she tackles with her anxiety. This relationship between colour and mood therefore  helped to combine the other members topics specifically the one entitled "colour and anxiety".

For the second image I layered the original coloured photograph of woodland with a combination of green and yellow watercolours instead of the slightly darker tones of blues and purples. This was meant to emulated the sense of a "better" fantasy where everything is good and perfect, and a world that is very different from the reality that the girl is living in.
For the animation we were going to have the girl starting off in her reality where everything is dark and where there are limited colours. The idea was then to flip the scene 180 degrees to show a much brighter and more colourful fantasy, where the girl is seen to be smiling and in a much better place emotionally.

My poster is therefore like a visual representation or explanation of the idea, exploring the fact that people often need a form of escapism from there everyday life, no matter how big or small the problems are that they face on a daily basis, people always need time to themselves to reflect and find their own peace.

This image making was supposed to be quite experimental, I wasn't sure how it would turn out but the end result seemed to be quite beneficial to my own project as well as the group's. The collective project gave me an insight into others ways I could look at my topic, rather then just focusing on the obvious associations with the words "fantasy" and "reality". It sparked ideas of how I could look at the transportation and transformation of things from reality into fantasy and visa versa.

After having made these images I started to think about how I could use them in a different way in my own project. One idea was to print one of the slightly more non realistic images (seen on the right) on tracing paper. This would leave some areas of the photograph more transparent than others, I therefore thought that I could layer it on top of text perhaps from the fairytale Little Red Ridding Hood or Alice in Wonderland (a story that also sees the transportation of a girl from reality into fantasy and back again). This would therefore add additional meaning to the image and let me explore the possibility of having my prints based on or illustrate particular stories or poems. I really liked how the image and the writing turned out when I put them together on a window as the light shined through the more transparent parts of the image to reveal different parts of the text better than others. It also seemed to enhance the colours of the image making it look more like a fantasy realm and the addition of the text from Alice in Wonderland made it seem as though the image could be illustration the "fantasy" world that Alice falls into.