TO DO list

right. i have a load of stuff i really need to do so i'm writing this list so i do not forget, or skip any of it.

- get the good stills from cinewedding film printed out onto 1.5 ft by 1.5 ft paper, so can dylom image- maker them onto canvas.
and with them you must:
~ layer them with pencil drawings of sketches from inside death camps,
~ layer them over the fingerprints camnvases
~ layer them over the dot canvases/line canveses to convey figures . person = dot/line
~ layer them over photographs of people nowadays

this list will be added to during the course of the day. when i remember stuff, have ideas etc.

amen

6 million

the paper clips project was a project started initially to try convey the sheer figure and mass of the 6 million jewish people killed during ww2.
to make the concept a more tangible one, the need for an outlet, or physical comparison becomes necessary.

artists such as sam winston have also experimented with the idea of conveying and converting huge figures of death/birth into a more tangible piece of work, to digest easily.
this is some of the information/quotation taken form his website:

''By the time you’ve read this sentence three people have been born into the world.
By the time you’ve read this sentence two will have passed away.
By the time you’ve lived through this twelve-hour day there will be 100,000 more children on the planet. And in the same twelve hours 70,000 people will have died.

Birthday is a work which sets out to record every individual birth and death over a twelve-hour period. Initially imagined to be realised in real time, marking the beat of each life with a small circle. But I immediately realised it was impossible to keep up with events and it would take many months to graphically capture the rhythm of life and death.

I find it interesting that we use numbers to quantify things yet once we pass a certain amount, scale slips away and it becomes incomprehensible. I wanted to understand what a 100,000 physically was – and for me that entailed marking out that number in pen and pencil.

In my mind I am still unable to comprehend such a figure but at least I know my body now holds a memory of the event."

i said at the beginning of my study of the holocaust that i wanted to try as best i could

to create a personal kind of emotive outcome. this word personal is what's now being challenged, even though each individual circle in actual fact has been considered and drawn and has been personally attended to, the overall picture does  not convey a personal account or closeness to the victims or protagonist involved, it is only the artist as aforementioned by winston that is aware of the notion and concept of the number, amount he's dealing with, be it 100,000 or 6,000,000.

this is something for me to think about, in my final piece. and which i'd rather address; my connection with the victims or the audiences'?

the FILM(s)

it started with the greatest find, i was digging around in my grandma's photo collections and came across a box of old cine 9mm film from 1940-1970 about.

so about £100 pounds later, and a snappy snaps dvd in hand, here's a couple of stills:

just doing a bit of editing now. will upload some decent stuff a little later. back to the drawing board, and looking forward to learning some video editing techniques tomorrow in digital media suite.

photographs from poland

    

photographs from poland

  

how do we convey a lost identity?

I went today to the saatchi gallery and had a wander around for a few hours. there were a couple of new and exciting artists that i discovered, so firstly i came across an artist called ximena garrido-lecca and it was her work names ''the followers that was exhibited at the saatchi. you can read about it here:

http://www.ximenagarridolecca.com/followers.pdf

i was inspired by her use of nostalgia and a mixture of found objects.images and text. The sense of every person is sincerely felt. Using this concept I'm going to try and create some images which convey the concept of identity. This idea as mentioned in the previous post that it's not just names and faces that manifest and conjure a sense of personality, relationship, it's the very presence of the person. I want to alter the method slightly though, I think I'm going to experiment with creating a sense of emotional connection through distance, exploring how layers and text can make an intimate place. picture or explicit sense of 'death' more removed from the audience, allowing them the option to wade through layers and history to try and connect with the subject matter.

I'm going to be using symbolicly rich imagery and recorded sounds, speeches and historical references and  found images of trees in aushwitch, my own photographs of poland and concetration camps, susan hiller's j street proj, empty spaces etc empty, life flowers and butterflies, how colour manifests itself and portray's an emotion: black-death and white - pure/peace.

putting a face to the name

So I've been researching mainly the personal approach/influences in what I know of the Holocaust, reading and flicking through various books such as 'Auschwitz and the Allies' by Martin Gilbert, but whilst visiting a Jewish library in North West London, I came across various files with lists and lists of names. Having visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel which is the largest Holocaust memorial museum and exhibition, there is spherical room with a high dome shaped ceiling, and the entire room is covered entirely with black and white pre war images of it's victims. No names, just hundreds and hundreds of pictures. I felt that there was a serious emotional distance between the images and myself and that sense of ''en masse'' is what in a strange sense, conveyed enough of a message, to understand and reflect on how individually important each image is, and how many people would in my own life, grieve over the death of a loved one, nevermind a murdered innocent love one.  So with this concept already planted in my mind, I came across a list of names, no photographs, unlike the aforementioned, the complete opposite, just names. I think using this distance of the unknown subject in war images of the deceased and maybe names and stories also I'm going to explore the differences or the connections/relationships between the face and the name.