Roughly a week ago, the night circus idea was born out of savannah’s mind. I was super on board with it, especially since we shared similar interests in subject matter - in mythology, fantasy, and the dark side of it. I keep thinking about it, my thoughts everywhere, and the same afternoon/night I collected images upon images of where my mind was taking this new spark of concept. I even bought a new A5 sketchbook to stick these images in, I’ve stuck in half the images so far and it feels like an overwhelming yet confusing trail of thought. My thoughts essentially jumped from:
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| mindmap version of the A5 book of images. |
I feel like I’ve dumped all these thoughts and associations I have with the circus into one place but haven’t really synthesized them completely.
highlights:
-the colourful, almost gaudy visuals, with confusing patterns and geometrics
-theatre/musical element
-selling the idea of ‘show of a life time/once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity’ and other hyperboles
-including the showcasing of exotics, ‘freaks’, the extraordinary you wouldn’t normally be able to see in the everyday (the non-everyday?)
-the classic alice: in particular the walrus (and the carpenter), original poem: ‘the time has come’ ‘…of cabbages and kings’
-the walrus luring the oysters onto shore to eat them all
-the fox in pinocchio luring him to pleasure island
-the beldam (other mother) luring coraline into the otherworld
-the boy, peter pan, luring little boys/wendy to neverland
-alternate reality, twisted: coraline, alice: madness returns (though in coraline she buys into the fantasy at first and gradually realized how wrong it was, and in alice: madness returns she returns to wonderland and it’s a train wreck, her mind in ruins)
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these ideas but they are certainly intriguing, though I am scared this will get a little cliché. the twisted version of fairytales has been done times and times before. (I left my ‘grimm’s fairytales’ book back in taiwan, haven’t read it yet) I originally wanted to do something to do with the morphed face/creature in my own practice, which I believe can be incorporated easily with the circus project… but to be honest I am a little bit stuck right now.
It feels like I have no ideas and too many at the same time. I have ideas that I want to do, but at the same time I’m thinking, will that add anything to this project? and I KNOW I should just do it, e.g. do the skull studies in oils from the skeleton trip at the museum of london, or do some digital drawing and manipulation from the photos of me from the ken kiff trip, or use the morphed landscapes that I morphed from my face and photoshop figures in it, but a few days ago I also started to paint on leftover blocks and pieces of wood because I was thinking of paul nash and his wonderful megaliths and have always wanted to create a setting with them (perhaps photoshop figures in there again, and them into another background..), also I thought about portraiture and how I can use makeup to manipulate the face a bit and photograph them with a good camera, or use a projector to map on some imagery, OR use temporary tattoo paper to print some images onto the face, OR I could learn how to make masks like how joan jonas uses her masks in her performative pieces, and ALSO i thought about stop motion and how much I want to do it and how scared I am to do it, or I could go back to the idea of balloon heads from last academic year bc I did really like that idea…. etctetc.
SO, I am having that problem I have in the beginning of a lot of projects where I feel like I have too many possible starting points that I am SCARED to do, and I should just get over it and do ONE of them instead of being stuck here and wasting time. I already wasted a week and more just feeling stuck and useless, and I’m ready to do SOMETHING now!!!! I feel a little bit better writing about this.
This week had felt very hectic and packed at uni (even though it wasn’t that much) and I didn’t really get any studio work done at all (partly due to being stuck, all I did this week was collect the wood bits from downstairs and paint 3 of them and get uninspired) I think it’s because I feel the need to record everything onto this blog that everything feels like it’s building up. But I need to put everything on here otherwise I will forget. Tomorrow is already the group show for Molly’s PPD, which she invited olive and I to. We are going to the site to set up and hang everything at 10am. She asked us to write a very brief artist statement and sentences to go with our painting. I chose the WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU one since I felt that it would go well with the environment. Below are the very brief sentences I sent:
WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU is an emotional response to a traumatic event from childhood. To kill or be killed, that is the reality illustrated from the vintage cartoons of predator and prey. This piece serves as a warning that trauma leaves a mark and that death is, indeed, inevitable.
Yulin works with themes of trauma as well as nostalgia found within childhood memories. Playing with abstraction in the paint, she challenges the blurred line between reality and fantasy.
I look at the ‘statement’ above and it’s true that I am always very drawn to those things but, recently I’ve been having the feeling that I should move on from the past, it’s getting a little overdone. But I know an element of it will always be there. It is a part of me after all. Literally.
I just saw Molly at the library, she was printing everything out for tomorrow’s show, and I am seeing how frantic and rushed a curating project can be. There’s so many things to consider. I actually have not seen the others’ works yet. She has already decided what would go where after drawing up a blueprint, which was a long process. It sounded very stressful … I hope tomorrow will go smoothly.
highlights:
-the colourful, almost gaudy visuals, with confusing patterns and geometrics
-theatre/musical element
-selling the idea of ‘show of a life time/once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity’ and other hyperboles
-including the showcasing of exotics, ‘freaks’, the extraordinary you wouldn’t normally be able to see in the everyday (the non-everyday?)
-the classic alice: in particular the walrus (and the carpenter), original poem: ‘the time has come’ ‘…of cabbages and kings’
-the walrus luring the oysters onto shore to eat them all
-the fox in pinocchio luring him to pleasure island
-the beldam (other mother) luring coraline into the otherworld
-the boy, peter pan, luring little boys/wendy to neverland
-alternate reality, twisted: coraline, alice: madness returns (though in coraline she buys into the fantasy at first and gradually realized how wrong it was, and in alice: madness returns she returns to wonderland and it’s a train wreck, her mind in ruins)
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these ideas but they are certainly intriguing, though I am scared this will get a little cliché. the twisted version of fairytales has been done times and times before. (I left my ‘grimm’s fairytales’ book back in taiwan, haven’t read it yet) I originally wanted to do something to do with the morphed face/creature in my own practice, which I believe can be incorporated easily with the circus project… but to be honest I am a little bit stuck right now.
It feels like I have no ideas and too many at the same time. I have ideas that I want to do, but at the same time I’m thinking, will that add anything to this project? and I KNOW I should just do it, e.g. do the skull studies in oils from the skeleton trip at the museum of london, or do some digital drawing and manipulation from the photos of me from the ken kiff trip, or use the morphed landscapes that I morphed from my face and photoshop figures in it, but a few days ago I also started to paint on leftover blocks and pieces of wood because I was thinking of paul nash and his wonderful megaliths and have always wanted to create a setting with them (perhaps photoshop figures in there again, and them into another background..), also I thought about portraiture and how I can use makeup to manipulate the face a bit and photograph them with a good camera, or use a projector to map on some imagery, OR use temporary tattoo paper to print some images onto the face, OR I could learn how to make masks like how joan jonas uses her masks in her performative pieces, and ALSO i thought about stop motion and how much I want to do it and how scared I am to do it, or I could go back to the idea of balloon heads from last academic year bc I did really like that idea…. etctetc.
SO, I am having that problem I have in the beginning of a lot of projects where I feel like I have too many possible starting points that I am SCARED to do, and I should just get over it and do ONE of them instead of being stuck here and wasting time. I already wasted a week and more just feeling stuck and useless, and I’m ready to do SOMETHING now!!!! I feel a little bit better writing about this.
This week had felt very hectic and packed at uni (even though it wasn’t that much) and I didn’t really get any studio work done at all (partly due to being stuck, all I did this week was collect the wood bits from downstairs and paint 3 of them and get uninspired) I think it’s because I feel the need to record everything onto this blog that everything feels like it’s building up. But I need to put everything on here otherwise I will forget. Tomorrow is already the group show for Molly’s PPD, which she invited olive and I to. We are going to the site to set up and hang everything at 10am. She asked us to write a very brief artist statement and sentences to go with our painting. I chose the WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU one since I felt that it would go well with the environment. Below are the very brief sentences I sent:
WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU is an emotional response to a traumatic event from childhood. To kill or be killed, that is the reality illustrated from the vintage cartoons of predator and prey. This piece serves as a warning that trauma leaves a mark and that death is, indeed, inevitable.
Yulin works with themes of trauma as well as nostalgia found within childhood memories. Playing with abstraction in the paint, she challenges the blurred line between reality and fantasy.
I look at the ‘statement’ above and it’s true that I am always very drawn to those things but, recently I’ve been having the feeling that I should move on from the past, it’s getting a little overdone. But I know an element of it will always be there. It is a part of me after all. Literally.
I just saw Molly at the library, she was printing everything out for tomorrow’s show, and I am seeing how frantic and rushed a curating project can be. There’s so many things to consider. I actually have not seen the others’ works yet. She has already decided what would go where after drawing up a blueprint, which was a long process. It sounded very stressful … I hope tomorrow will go smoothly.
