‘you must love me’

‘you must love me’ Thesis:

(these are the original notes I had written down upon planning out this series fully. It was a great way to release my ideas and explore my thoughts deeper than I ever have. I hope this can act as a good insight into the intent behind this series and inspire a deeper consideration into the final photos…)

“Deep in my heart, I’m concealing

Things that I’m longing to say

Scared to confess what I’m feeling

Frightened you’ll slip away

You must love me, you must love me…”

• ‘What is the project?’

The project/series is a set of square images, to be self portraits that depict an overbearing catalyst of emotions. I wish to ask the viewer what it means to feel, and what happens when we get so many feelings at once.

• ‘How will this project come into fruition?’

I have been looking at old artworks and looking at how they chose certain brushstrokes as a means to capture a feelings or an essence; with photography, it can be so easy to have that control via digital means to portray something- being able to change colours later with digital manipulations applications to express a mood, or use lighting to set an atmosphere. But when renaissance painters would create, each stroke had to be painstakingly considered, matching what their imagination presented to them.

• ‘What are your main sources of inspiration?’

• Nicola Samori(2) - an artist who’s style captures a ‘contemporary interpretation’(1) on classic painting techniques: he uses mixed medium techniques like ‘scraping, diluting, slashing and tearing’(1) to over dramatise and accentuate baroque-esque stylistic choices.
• The weight of feelings - As I venture into adulthood, I begin to learn what it means to balance a plethora of feelings. From work life, passions, family, friends, a relationship, hobbies and everyday tasks and occurrences to name but a few. With my childhood diagnosis of a low form of Autism. I believe that this correlates with the weight of feelings that occurs most frequently. Still learning of my personal connection with Autism, I wish to explore how it may be a part of my life.
• Old works of mine(3) - When I was studying at college, we had to do a project using studio lighting, the thought of it terrified me as I am so used to shooting in natural light and never shot with so much advanced equipment. So I decided to go against the natural grain of studio photography and instead find inspiration with classic renaissance paintings and the emulate their lighting choices for high contrast and bold images. 

• ‘Why do you wish to create this series?’

I hope that with this series I am able to explore new ways of creating; creating with the intension of a final series of works that can be pieced together for a longer narrative, this will be a contrast to my typical work process as I usually rely on just one photo to tell my story, but lately I have come to admire other photographers such as Brooke Shaden who create with the intention of the work to be seen as a final series. I have been wanting to delve further and deeper into thematics and concepts that I have previously explored, my knowledge on the subjects I discuss in my work has been getting more developed, so I wish to almost update that in my portfolio and see how far my understanding has gone.

With this series, I want to be more confident in the meaning behind it. More frequently I find that I lack confidence in my work, unable to fully explain the narrative behind it as I don’t feel 100 percent aware or confident in why I am creating said work. So I decided to take it upon myself to be more serious in my work process, and try new things that would allow my work process to become more fluent and clear in both my mind, and any one who were to be invested in my work such as people that follow my social media accounts and work, or any potential clients. Doing things like this thesis allow me to write down what’s in my head, and being able to fully express that into words, that I can use in conversations or promotions of my series. I hope that creating series like this one will boost my confidence in putting my work out into the world in a more business-linked way; I would love to be able to contact a gallery space with a thesis like this, as well as inspiration photos and first attempts or final images. This would mean that the gallery are more likely to have that extra bit of confidence in me and my work, and feel more invested in working with me as I have a fully written out plan.

• ‘Any new/old technical elements that are key in this series development?’

As an art student, I spent a lot of my time experimenting with different means of art. This included painting and stitching onto photos. I hope to bring back these techniques in this series as I have a true love for art and the many forms in-which we can create with it. I remember taking photos that were simplistic alone, but bringing them to life by adding new elements in. Another already tried technique is capturing the human form through the means of photography. I began photography mostly taking self portraits that captured the human form, allowing for me to see portraiture in a whole new way; opening my eyes to how humans form. This is vital to this series as I want to see the human form in a whole new light, experimenting through the use of self-portraiture to see how contorted and twisted we can get. With the final images, I may layer images of brushstrokes and painting splats onto digital images, this would require my previous skills in photoshop. 

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