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.