Contemporary contexts Final piece and review

After the issues with my previous experimentation, I decided to go back to the watercolour piece that abstractly represented how I envisioned the polyps that make up coral to look and decided to expand on this. Throughout the project I envisioned the final piece to illustrate the contrast between what healthy coral looks like in comparison to bleached coral. By doing this I hoped that viewers would make sufficient efforts to mitigate the impacts of their everyday activities on global warming and its resulting effects on sea temperatures and the destruction of coral reefs. I therefore decided to paint the piece with colourful polyps progressing into less colourful ones to show that this is what will happen to these underwater environments if we don’t take better care of them.

Primary visual research for further developmentation:

Even though I liked the outcome of the final piece, I still felt like it needed more information to better illustrate the message. Walking across an English beach I took pictures of various imagery and textures that might be good to add to it but later decided that this might make the piece look too cluttered and busy so I chose to leave it how it was.

Contemporary contexts- Further experimentation

I thought about different elements to the argument of reef preservation, such as why coral is dying and the effects of this on the local communities that rely on these environments for necessities such as food and money. One factor that affects the health of the reefs is over fishing and unsustainable fishing methods. This reason particularly stood out to me as it seemed very self destructive; the people who needed the reefs the most were one of the main causes for their destruction. 

I thought it might de interesting to sew into the final image on what ever material I choose to do it on, be it fabric or paper, as it might work to illustrate a fishing net. I kind of made this technique/formation of stitches up as I went along but thought it actually made the sort of pattern of lines I wanted to create. However it doesn't really resemble a net's lattice formation and therefore it might be useful for me to experiment more with different stitching techniques.

Still not sure about the effectiveness of the imagery I had made so far, I started experimenting with illustrating the colours and textures that resemble dead coral in the same sort of cell like blobs I used earlier in my experimentation.

I also thought about making a poster for the final piece as I thought the use of words might enable me to communicate my message more effectively. I really liked the watercolour + salt technique I had used earlier and wanted to incorporate this into the image some how so decided to experiment with making typography out of it. I am not very comfortable with using fonts and typography in my work as I don't have much experience in this area so thought creating my own might be a good solution. 

Although I think this could a good way of communicating this particular issue, I didn't feel that this was a path I wanted to take with my project and decided to focus more on trying to make the imagery speak for it's self.

Contemporary contexts- More research and experiments

Alexi Wynn Williams 

Alexi Wynn Williams sculpture, Echoes of the Kill, is an oversized butcher’s block with a forest like installation of wax forms rising up off it. The forms were created from filling the negative space of lungs with molten wax, poured directly into the airways of dead cattle and horses. These casts were then put through a maceration process which uses acid to dissolve the flesh and reveal the wax forms.  The viewer approaches the work without knowledge of what they are engaging in.

Echoes of the Kill blurs boundaries and explores the boarders of where something stops to exist in one way and takes on new meaning. When I saw this with my current project in mind, I immediately related the colourless sculptures as bleached coral. Even though this may not have been what the artist intended to portray, the detail that came out of producing the structures in this way echoes the beautifully intricate formations of corals and helps people to see that they are worth saving for future generations to appreciate. 

Laura Jones

Laura Jones's Paintings aim to raise awareness of coral bleaching within Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Although these events are undeniably sad she wanted to bring hope to fact that we are able to stop these processes and highlight the resilience of the reef. People aren't always able to see the affects of global warming on coral reefs and the ecosystem that relies on it. By making this almost alien underwater world accessible around the world, Jones's paintings, along with the work of the other artists I have looked at, almost act as a campaign to get people to think more carefully about their actions and their affect on the environment.

The use of acrylic in her painting work well to bring to life the unusual textures one may see when diving and the bold blocks of colour seem to highlight the strength and resilience of the Great Barrier Reef.

See more at:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/30/bleached-laura-joness-hope-for-the-reef

After all the research I did and facts that I gathered I found it difficult to put all the information into imagery that really conveyed the message I was trying to get across. There seems to be so much that I need to include to make the image make sense but I know that if I include everything the end result will just look messy.

As I was a bit stuck for ideas I thought it was better just to create imagery and see what happened so obviously I started by trying to illustrate an image of a reef. I then experimented with making it look bleached by editing it.

With both this painting and the previous one I used watercolours with a wet on wet technique to make the colours merge and subtly blend as they sometimes seem to do underwater. I also used salt as it gives the dried paint an interesting texture which almost reminded me of the different textures od coral. I also thought there was something nice about using sea salt to create imagery of the pace it came from, almost putting it back into its original environment. Although it doesn't realistically illustrate what coral looks like, the pattern is a abstract interpretation of what I envisioned it to look like after finding out that they are made up of hundreds to thousands of tiny creatures called polyps. This formation almost reminded me of how everything is made up of cells and I tried to replicate this in the image.

Adding an illustration of a diving mask in my imagery was one way I thought of showing the human interference in the survival of these environments.

I experimented with layering the different imagery I created on photoshop and using different blending options. This particular blend of layers was quite interesting as it changed the colour of the cell/polyp like pattern to flaming oranges and I thought the association of heat with these colours hinted at the main cause for coral bleaching, global warming.

I didn't really like this outcome as I thought it was a bit too busy and messy as all the colours seemed to blend too much together. Within the senses of the mask I turned the coral illustration to black and white to show how this is what reefs will turn into if we don't change our actions to stop the bleaching process.

I felt that this composition was slightly more successful as it gave a comparison between a healthy coral reef and a dead one, again showing what will happen if sea temperatures continue to rise and other human actions don't change.

However I do think that the mask needs to have some colour within it and the whole image almost annoys me a bit as I feel like it is too flat and maybe I should have cut the strap out.

Contemporary contexts- Initial Research

For this project we were encouraged to choose a current issue in the world that we wanted to find new ways to communicate and convince people to make a change. I couldn't really think of a personal topic that I could use so decided to choose something environmental as these are the sorts of images I enjoy illustrating and documenting photographically.

There were a few options I came across including volcanic activity and the effects on the surrounding communities. However I decided to choose coral bleaching and the destruction of reefs around the world as it is something I had briefly earned about at GCSE and wanted to find out more.

I initially experimented with creating imagery that compared a healthy reef with a bleached or dead one. The first idea I came up with was to compose the image inside a clock with the majority of the image inside being in colour with one of the hands of the clock seemingly revealing the same image underneath, only it is in black and white. Instead of making this a still image, I thought about making it into an animation where the viewer would be able to see the reef transform from a healthy environment into a dead one. As a result this looping animation would highlight the fact that time is running out if we want to preserve these environments and their ecosystems for future generations. 

Looking back on the idea now I think it could have been quite affective and am a bit disappointed I didn't pursue it further for the only reason that I am not confident in producing work using this method...

However I did think the image of the skeletal fish fish was quite striking and might use it later on in my project to show the effect coral bleaching can have on other marine life that rely on coral for thinks such as shelter, protection and food.

Images of sketchbook research: