Chloe Piene

I have been looking at the video work of Chloe Piene as she is interested in youth culture. In The Woods, which was shown at Liverpool Biennial in 2002, Piene filmed a group of teenagers in a 'mosh-pit' in a club-like setting. Piene then slowed the video and sound down so that it highlighted the ritualistic type behaviour of hardcore music fans dancing to their favourite music in a group. Similarly in Self Portrait, 2002, Piene drew a crowd of metal fans to a concert and filmed herself crowd-surfing among them. She used a spotlight on her body so that she would become over-exposed; creating an ethereal, glowing, almost religious figure above the metal fans. This again references religious and tribal themes.

In other video works, such as Blackmouth, Piene shows a frustrated young girl in isolation - showing the power of the human body as the girl howls; presenting herself as a hybrid between human and animal. Piene films herself in this same way in You're Gonna Be My Woman; where she is isolated and trapped in a concrete cube; appearing erotic and tortured, almost possessed by demons. Both of these films were also edited and slowed down as part of Piene's signature style.

I'm interested in similar themes to Chloe Piene - in youth culture, and shared experiences such as clubbing and going to concerts, very similar to those that Piene depicts. People feature strongly in her work, which is something I am keen to develop; I like the contrast between some of her videos which depict large groups of people, and others that show a lone person in isolation. My work has been described to sometimes look like that of a 'journalist photographer' as I depict students isolated, as though there is a spotlight on them. Light is very important in Piene's work as it is in mine; figures often have a spotlight on them, and the work has a 'glow' to it - which I am starting to include a lot in my paintings. The colour, or the 'glow', aiming to sum up the atmosphere of the memory. Piene's tribal themes really interest me; - showing teenage behaviour as cult-like and ritualistic. I think student culture and nightlife can be similar to this. It has made me think more about other scenes I can depict. As Piene has also focused on revelers; it has made me think more about the UK riots that happened in 2011, across various cities in Birmingham. I might start collecting some images of this to work from, as it is a recent experience that we all have memories of; as it was so widely covered in the media at the time. I want to now start collecting my images from video footage; as the stills of Piene's work I have here have an 'in the moment' quality, as they are like action shots; which I think could really improve my work.

Eberhard Havekost

Havekost creates his paintings from his own collection of photos and videos - digitally altering the original image. The alterations are generally subtle - such as a slight change in hue, and then these changes are then translated into painting. The paintings are therefore slightly inaccurate perceptions - adjusted versions of the truth, but they actually end up making more visually pleasing images as he reaches an 'ideal image'. Havekost is interested in the city and modernist buildings, - interested in politics and the idea of a failed utopia. His work doesn't seem overtly political though - there isn't any emotive or protest-style language - but one of banality. Havekost crops images and uses extreme close-ups, which make his work almost pure abstraction. 

The process of Havekost's practice is very similar to mine in that I also collect photos and video footage from the media, and then digitally alter them. However, I also emulsion print them, in order to 'lose' even more of the image (before re-scanning and re-editing). The digitally altered images then provide plans for paintings. Havekost's images veer towards abstraction and there is an ambiguity to them - much like what I try to create with my own paintings. I want the viewers to be able to 'fill in' the story - to work out the narrative of what is happening within the images, as so much of it has been erased. Havekost's paintings also look like memories, in that they look fleeting; snapshots of time and place. I am trying to create the same thing within my own images - a collective memory of an era; a summing up of time and place. I'm also interested in the city and this dystopian view - but not so much the banality of ideal image of it. I want to show 'truth', or at least the perception we might have of an event through the media. As I am working with collective memories that I want viewers to recognise - even in my abstractions I need to keep an element of truth or familiarity, so that viewers can recognise what the images are relating to. Havekost generally creates a series of several paintings and displays them together, so they become part of a story; filling a narrative. I am hoping to do the same with my own work - create a series of images that relate to the collective memories of my generation/fellow students, and that refers to life in the city. 

Merlin Carpenter

Merlin Carpenter's paintings juxtapose models and actresses over disconnected painterly backgrounds. Carpenter collects images from fashion magazines and appropriates them onto an abstract ground. Carpenter's work plays with themes of authorship, the relationship between contemporary and more historic image-making, and the cult of commodity. I like the way in which Carpenter combines elements of photorealist painting on top of much hazier and loose abstract painting. In this painting, Carpenter also uses a monochrome colour scheme for the background, further emphasising the distinction. I am interested in a similar process of working to this, - using both hazier and more detailed elements. I often isolate the people in my work from the background in the same way that Carpenter has. I also collect images from magazines and newspapers, and then combine them with my own photographs, to create a separation and fragmentation between layers of the image. I like carpenter's technique of painting in very different styles, so that the viewer's attention is first drawn to the model, before looking at the background. In this painting, a sense of the importance of the commodity in society is given simply through only two images, plus the titling of the work. Clues are given to the viewer as to whether this is a comment on society, and possibly a negative one at that. My work is about society and our shared experiences, and I also want to create paintings that reflect on current themes and issues; possibly using concerning images but not painting them in a negative way. I don't want my paintings to appear immediately negative to a viewer; if there is any negativity I only want this to be a more subtle undertone.

Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown's paintings have fluidity to them - plenty of oil is used on the surface of the canvas which creates a sense of flow and motion as the paint blends together. The content of the imagery itself may be slightly more negative and grotesque, but Brown buries this underneath folds and swirls of paint, leaving remainders of the original image as clues to the viewer of what they are looking at. I really like how hazy and blurry this particular painting is; as though it is a dream or memory that keeps drifting out of focus. I like that the painting style is leaning towards abstraction in a lot of Brown's work, and there is something aesthetically pleasing about the paint, but then slightly more sinister images unravel in the paint. I am interested in creating paintings with elements similar to this one - with parts that are blurry and hazy, and slightly cover a more negative undertone. I'm not interested in creating paintings that are fluid and painterly all over in the same sense of this; I want there to be parts of the image that are more blurry, and other detailed elements to create contrast within the image. I want there to be a focused element; so that the viewer has a focal point and then can try and work out the rest of the image which fades away to nothing. I like this technique to try and recreate how memories drift in and out of focus in our mind; and the edges sometimes fading away completely.

Michael Raedecker

Michael Raedecker's paintings are often of empty buildings; imaginary looking scenes that we may have seen in a film or dream, that appear uninhabited and lonely. There are never any people in the paintings, just empty shells where we can imagine what's inside. Raedecker uses acrylic paint and thread on canvas - using thread to build up detail and density. The rest of the canvas tends to be blank colour; adding to the isolation of the buildings. The colour schemes Raecker uses tend to add to the unsettling quality of his canvases; gloomy colours and shadows; but with the buildings emanating light, making us intrigued to what lies inside. There is no obvious narrative to Raedecker's work, instead he allows viewers to make this up themselves. He gives clues towards a narrative through depicting parts of a scene and creating atmosphere in his paintings.

In my own work I am starting to look at creating canvases that look at society, but have a more sinister undertone due to the colours used. In my Carnage Bar Crawl paintings I started to do this, where I isolated two students and detached them from the scene and the crowd. I put a spotlight on them, in the same way that Raedecker puts a spotlight on his buildings; through colour and isolation. I am interested in having mainly one part of detail on the canvas, and leaving the rest blank in the way that Raedecker does. It highlights part of the story without giving too much of the narrative away. In terms of memory, it emphasises that we don't have perfect recall; only remembering parts of an event, and other parts are much more hazy or even obsolete. In my work on Jessops and HMV closing down, I have started to look at qualities similar to that of Raedecker's paintings - the lack of people or presence of life which take away clues of time and place. We know that the administration of Jessops/HMV is a recent event, but our knowledge of that is the only clue, as the emulsion prints don't hint at whether they are set in the past, present or future. I'm becoming more interested in this slightly dystopian view of society - images of society with a slightly concerning undertone; - of shops closing down, students misbehaving and youths rioting. Although I used to create fairly obvious narratives by collaging several images on the wall, I am now interested in displaying only parts of the story, just clues, in the way that Raedecker does. I want to enable the viewer to fill in the rest of the narrative of what the work's about.

William Hogarth

William Hogarth was a famous painter and engraver in the 18th century. He became well-known after the publication of the first of his 'modern moral subjects'; a series of 6 engravings named 'A Harlot's Progress'. This was then followed by 'A Rake's Progress'.

In 'A Harlot's Progress' the miserable fate of a prostitute is narrated through six scenes; from her becoming a prostitute, to her death, and funeral. After the success of this series, Hogarth created 'A Rake's Progress'; in which eight pictures depicted the life of a rich merchant's son, who wasted all of his money on gambling and living luxuriously, and ended up in Bedlam Hospital.

Hogarth's work was very popular and was printed numerous times, because it was a comment on society at that time. Hogarth depicted society from a satirical viewpoint; one which was much more rarely shown at the time. He was the equivalent to a social/documentary photographer, or journalist, in today's terms. He drew inspiration from culture and subjects around him.

I am interested in this idea of depicting real-life society, the culture and shared experiences of what's going on around me. Although I have been working on creating a narrative within large-scale collages, I am now interested in creating a larger series of paintings, which create a narrative through the solitary images, in the same way that Hogarth's does. With Hogarth's images, the viewer can fill in the narrative themselves; which was obviously much more familiar and everyday to viewers at the time; adding to their pool of collective/shared memory, in the same way that photographs do today.

Elizabeth Peyton

The portraiture of Elizabeth Peyton is distinctive in style; focusing mainly on iconic celebrities; often men. Her first well known series of portraits were of Kurt Cobain. Peyton is interested in the cult of celebrity of her time; and collects images from magazines to work from. Her work was very much inspired by the public domain. The painting technique is lovingly rendered, as though she has a devotion to her subjects. Peyton went on to paint political leaders, actors, and her boyfriends in this same way; her admiration for them is evident through the way that she paints them. 

I am starting to look into painting myself now, and my paintings of students have an element of portraiture painting about them. Although my most recent work depicted students being sick and acting drunkenly; feedback was that I had painted them in a loving, caring way; as though I was obsessively drawing it from the original photograph in places; similar to how Peyton does. I like this idea of painting potentially negative scenes in an attractive way; so that they have the aesthetic qualities of portraiture, but the content of something slightly more negative and dystopian. 

Peyton works with images from public domain; working with collective imagery – in that the subjects are iconic, as well as the original images; through being repeatedly printed in magazines and posters. I also draw imagery from similar sources. I have used journalist's images from newspaper articles in a lot of the Carnage bar crawl work I have produced. I like mediating imagery that might have once been familiar to an audience; they may have seen the original images in newspapers that I have worked from. I have appropriated them so they may still seem familiar, or other viewers may not realise. The 'carnage' t-shirt that features in a lot of my recent work is an item of clothing that is identifiable to students nationwide: it is the ticket itself to the biggest annual bar crawl, and looks the same year-on-year. As I am interested in the shared experiences of my student generation; I like that student viewers of my work will instantly recognise which event the work is about, and most likely have their own personal memories of it. Yet someone not in this collective; an older/younger person might not be familiar with it, and would just associate the work with youth generally from an outside perspective.

I want to experiment more with painting; exploring how brush marks, light and focus can create an atmosphere. This might help the viewer fill in the narrative, as I have started to leave more of the image blank. 

Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing is photographer and filmmaker that documents shocking, and sometimes amusing behaviour of the people of Britain. Wearing is interested in society and the British public. Most famously Wearing stopped the general public and encouraged them to write the first thing that came into their heads onto a piece of paper, and then would photograph them with it. The piece became a social commentary as it revealed the private thoughts of the public and brought them into the public sphere.

In the piece Broad Street, 2001, Wearing presented a six-screen colour video projection which lasted 40 minutes, and depicted the social scene of Broad Street in Birmingham on an average night. The piece showed people drinking, smoking, dancing and getting in and out of taxis. Unfortunately I haven't actually seen the piece within the gallery context - I have had to interpret it mainly from stills of it in books and online, so therefore my perceptions will be skewed. Apparently the surrounding video projections caused the viewer to be disorientated, - almost replicating the feeling of being inebriated and in a busy club. I, too, have been looking at creating the effect of a 'drunken haze' by using blurry lights; sometimes soft, and sometimes eratic. I also blur other parts of the image and erase other parts to further the effect. Wearing chose to film Birmingham as it is her hometown; and she wanted to show the culture of nightlife that was happening here at the time. I'm interested in creating work for the same reasons - I have also been creating work based on Birmingham Broad Street, as I want to look at the student nightlife and binge-drinking culture that is currently happening in Birmingham. The reason that I am interested in Birmingham is that I'm interested in the city, as well as the crossover of personal and collective memories of myself and other students living here for University. I have been taking my own photos and stills from videos similar to Wearing, but also collecting images from the media and online. Looking back at Wearing's work now, (at Broad Street, which is over ten years old), it really sums up an era. The fashion; hairstyles and people smoking indoors are all giveaways to the time in which the video refers to; even if at the time it was just 'current'. I want to sum up recent years in Birmingham in the same way - using similar hints to the time and place. Wearing's aim is to honestly depict life and life around her; which is really what I want to do. I am interested in the shared experiences of today and of recent times - drawing inspiration from society.

Muntean and Rosenblum

Muntean and Rosenblum create large-scale paintings of adolescent figures, often set in urban landscapes. The paintings are almost cartoon-like and show contemporary society. The individuals in the images look young and trendy; casual, but also slightly bored and disengaged. Although their clothing and fashion sense is what places these paintings into modern day, the actual painting style seems to reference the Renaissance; as they sometimes have dramatic landscapes and have an almost theatrical composition of people. Beneath the imagery is text, almost like comic-book style captions but it is far less explanatory and more philosophical than comic book text. The text could be a commentary on modern society but only if we want to make that link; as the phrases could be interpreted in different ways by different viewers.

In my own work I am interested in depicting the generation of the urban youth, similar to Muntean and Rosenblum. I find their work interesting because of how nonchalant the adolescents look; pictured casually doing everyday things. I like this idea of the subject matter being current or everyday life; - I'm not interested in creating drama or depicting particularly unusual scenes. I like the idea of capturing a sector of society, or creating a picture or mirror of society, not with commentary or judgement; just to show today's times. Muntean and Rosenblum also focus on urban settings which I'm also interested in. I live in the city so it's easy to draw inspiration from that, and it's where a denser population are. I'm not particularly interested in the classical style painting of Muntean and Rosenblum's work, but I am interested in the content. I might try and add more painting into my work in the future though, as feedback seems to be that people find most of my work to have a painterly quality.

Marianne Hirsch

Marianne Hirsch coined the term 'postmemory', and talked about it in relation to Boltanski's work. Postmemory describes how memories are inherited by the second generation after a traumatic event; their transmittance is so strong that they constitute memories in their own right, even though they happened before their births and are in fact their parents’ memories. Hirsch developed this notion in relation specifically in relation to children of Holocaust survivors; but believes the theory can be transferred to other second generation memories of traumatic events. The children of Holocaust survivors have their own memories of the trauma, even though it was the experiences of their parents; due to the passing on of information and images the memories become the child’s own. Hirsch is interested in how we remember this traumatic event; often recalling familiar images that we have seen through photography, film, television, art and cultural artefacts. Even more widely, I think the holocaust has come to be something that we all remember, even those of us that have no personal relationship to it, through the documentation and photography we still see.

Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski uses photography to evoke the past in his work; particularly relating to collective memory  of the Holocaust. Boltanksi is mainly interested in the tragedies of the Holocaust, and uses photographs; often of Jewish children, to serve as a reminder to the viewer of the horrors that occurred during the Holocaust. Boltanksi works with a wide range of media comprising of sculpture, installation, photography, film and painting. Boltanski’s installations awaken memories of the Holocaust; whether it is that these memories are personal, collective, real, invented, or imagined by the viewer. The installations usually comprise of close-up photographs (of Holocaust victims, we presume); which are found photographs that Boltanski has re-photographed, cropped and enlarged, causing the facial features to lose clarity – similar to the blurry nature that our mental visualisations of a memory might have. The photographs are displayed with black desk lamps placed very close to the images, which aim their light right at the centre of the faces, giving us sinister ideas of torture and interrogation. Boltanski then adds sound, light and objects to awaken our senses and cause involuntary associations with the Holocaust. Boltanski’s added objects might include clothes, which are evoke an emotional response as we presume them to be the clothes of the people photographed. The clothes match the photographs as they appear archival in nature. Boltanski deals with memory by presenting documentation of survivors’ lives: - their clothes, their photographs, their possessions, which he describes as ‘small memory’. His installations are almost like altarpieces; their use of candles and shrine-like display making us associate them with a commemoration of death. 

In The Storehouse, Boltanski displays seven enlarged photographs of young girls resting on piles of unlabeled biscuit tins containing scraps of fabric. Archives, 1988, is of a similar nature; in which Boltanski displays thirty photographs, each atop a biscuit tin with an individual lamp. Both works appear to be an archive, or perhaps a memorial, of Holocaust victims’ lives. The biscuit tins, which in the past were often used as a safe and easily locatable place to keep the family documents, are displayed, weathered and rusty; having connotations with the past and the preservation/store of memory. The photographs are black-and-white, blurry and enlarged, appearing to be old and faded. Boltanski uses titling to suggest possible meanings to the viewer. The titles of two of his works, The Storehouse, which could be describing memory itself, and Archives, both refer to documentation of the past. This is further emphasised by the aged biscuit tins and faded photographs. The work becomes about collective memory because of the sense of anonymity. Unlike Goldin’s photographs, where the viewer is looking at the artist’s own personal memories, here the viewer is confronted with the memories of anonymous people. The faces are intentionally blurred so that their features lose definition and become unrecognisable. The volumes of unlabeled biscuit tins also add to the idea of a collection of unnamed people.

Boltanski doesn’t actually use ‘true’ images; - the photographs of supposed Holocaust victims are in fact of random school children, which are from magazines and newspapers, and other found sources. Boltanski then edits them in a way to forge an aged quality to the image, making viewers think they are old photographs. In my own work I am interested in editing photographs so that the viewer believes them to be something that they are not. I am not trying to create a fake ‘archive’ of a past event in the same way Boltanski does, but I do want my photographs to appear general enough that viewers can attach their own memories to them. Boltanski blurs the facial features of people in his photographs, which helps to add anonymity to the piece; making it more relatable to collective memory. This is a technique that I could use myself when I am using images of people in my work. Although I am interested in Boltanski’s work because it relates to collective memory and uses photography, I don’t want to display my work in the same way. Boltanski focuses heavily on the ‘archive’ and his work is very static in nature. What I want to do is create pieces of work that portray what we might mentally visualise when recalling a memory. It needs to appear more fleeting and have more life than Boltanski’s.

Marcel Proust

As the idea of 'memory', the struggles of perfect recollection and collective memory, have been an inspiration for my practice I decided to do some reading into memory itself. While I have been reading about memory mainly from a psychological and scientific point of view, I decided to read Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, to get a more philosophical scope on the subject. Proust coined the term 'involuntary memory' in Swann's Way (Vol I In Search of Lost Time). Proust distinguished between voluntary and involuntary memory; voluntary referred to a person consciously trying to recollect a past memory, whereas an involuntary memory is when a sensory experience might trigger a memory. Familiar smells and tastes might take us back to our childhood without us actively trying to recall that memory. For example, the taste of children's sweets or smell/texture of plasticine. Within the novel there are several occurrences in which a sensory experience triggers a memory for Proust. The most famous of which is when the taste of a madeleine cake invokes a memory of his childhood:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

(Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way).


If I am interested in the idea of collective memory I need to think about how I can trigger a memory for a viewer. There is a difference between a viewer seeing my work and consciously trying to recall similar memories, which would be a 'voluntary' memory, or whether the memory is triggered for them by familiar imagery, smells and sounds etc ('involuntary' memory). At the moment I want to continue concentrating on solely imagery in evoking memories for the viewer. I need to get better accomplished at the techniques I am currently using before I can think about introducing more performative aspects to my work.