Final

Acheivements

I wanted to create the notion of Sex. I did this particular piece to show the motion of sex, the feeling and colour. I wanted to be able to express what sex looks like for me and my partner.

I was, for a long time struggling for ideas how to portray sex, as mentioned earlier I was thinking of a set of paintings, or a sculpture, but none of these pieces would have held any context for this particular notion which I felt strongly about. I wanted to allow people to see all the attributes of sex without shoving a penis and vagina in there face.

Colour:
The colours on the board portrayed the feeling and emotion during the time of sex, this was done by closing our eyes and visualizing a colour we saw or felt during that time.

Smearing:
Obviously there was a lot of smearing paint across the board, this signified the movement of sex, the chaos that sometimes there is. When I picture sex I sometimes only think of arms and legs flinging about in ruffled blankets.

Hand/feet:
The hand and feet prints showed positioning, this is were I hope people can relate to the piece by working out in their head were my partner and I may have been positioned.

I believe I achieved my goal of completing a piece of work that portrays a notion I had.

CLOSE-ups

Imprint

Once we had given the darkroom a good clean we were left with our piece.

Aftermath

Once we had finished we washed all the paint off ourselves. The easiest way to do this was by filling the large sink up in the darkroom and bathing in the water. This worked well and kept us from treading paint everywhere throughout the art department.

  

'Doing it'

It was now the night to get the project underway. My partner and I came up to the institute around 9 p.m making sure it was a time where nobody if anybody would be up there. We first needed to set the board up, we started by bringing it into the dark room, and placing newspaper around the edges so no paint would be splashed on the floor. We grabbed the paints we were going to use and got ready to strip down.

I then asked Kirstin to close her eyes and picture what colour she usually in-visions when we are having sex, she said red, sooo....I poured a whole lot of red paint down her neck and back as I wanted a main body/buttocks imprint on the board. I then covered parts of my body with the colours I see during sex before laying on top of her.
While performing we continued to smother colours of paint on the each other depending on sensation and feeling. As we performed we noticed we had slid quite high up the board, but this was fine as there were no rules of control to this piece of work.

Base

Early Thursday morning I painted my piece of ply wood white. This was going to be the base as I wanted the colours we used for the actual project to stand out and give vibrance.
I needed to apply two coats of white primer as the ply wood soaked up a lot of the first.

Issues

As I expected a few issues have came about. Of coarse I expected this and it is also part of the brief to have technical issues that we have to solve.
These are minor issues.
The piece of plywood is 2.4 x 1.2m therefore to move it around has been a task in itself. I was lucky that my father has a work vehicle that was able to fit the board in. He then dropped it off to my place, I then had to get the assistance of Harry to come down to the Hostel and help me carry it back up via what I call 'the stairs of despair'.
The board was quite rough as well, so before I was to paint it I needed to give it a quick sand, just to make it a bit smoother for me and my partner to move around on.
A big issue has been where to actually 'do' my project. I am hoping to come in to the institute late Saturday night and set up in the Dark Room with a 'Do Not Disturb' notice on the door. We also have to be careful not to spread paint through the art department, which might mean having to wash ourselves somewhere as soon as we have finish.
The last issue is keeping paint away from our genitals while we are having sex. Im not really sure what would be the case if paint was to get in those areas but I'm not willing to risk it anyway.

Materials

I now needed to buy the materials for this project.
At the moment I have arranged for my partner Kirstin to come over from Hastings to of coarse "help me" with the work needed to make this piece.
She will be here next weekend, and will only be here for two days so I need to have all materials.

I managed to buy a piece of plywood this week from Mitre 10.
2.4m x 1.4m dimensions

Next I need to seal the board and paint it white. I will then buy some coloured paint, for the project itself.

New Idea

This new idea was conceived by my partner whose dream it was always to do this. This method I believe shows sex without having to literally perform the act, it also shows the movement, feeling, and colour of sex. It can show the chaos and passion while giving the sense of power and pleasure.

The idea is to fuck in paint while on a blank board/canvas.

I am hoping I will have something like these images to present to the class.

http://fineartamerica.com/images-stretched-canvas/black/break/images-medium/body-painting-charles-harrison-pompa.jpg

http://suitcasemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Love-Paint-Alexander-Esguerra-12.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCYco5PNnrlr_P1xxQw4tgpsh50Ha2GgWX6FdQFXlabV4IFht9j5hk1k4Y_t8PJBmQmtiMMsxun65BMJzMp55vsj5SiEwYRZCyEyu1nXPKObbYsouBJ2zKBq-PxdtqO2Eb0cRfRgK3ZLp6/s640/_MG_0820.jpg

New approach

I needed to figure out a new approach to portray my notion in a piece of art. I was starting to stress and have absolutely no idea how I was going to show this piece and also give it context.

I laid in bed one night thinking...

I had basically nothing, no idea how I was gonna do this without literally making a porn.
Then it came to me, an idea that my partner shared with me along time ago...

Change

It was evident to me before I even put brush to canvas that these set of paintings were not going to work. I needed to show feeling, power and movement. As i started to do preliminary sketches of what paintings I was going to do I realized there would be no context within them and all they would be are paintings of penises and vagina's.

Knowing these paintings would have no real context in them I needed to go back to the drawing board. It was disappointing as it took a while to think of how to portray this particular notion right from the start.

I then had an idea of a sculpture.

Again, before I even started I knew this work had no context in it, It showed nothing of the notion I wanted to give. All it was.... was a sculpture.

Process

It was very difficult to think of a way to show the notion of sex without physically showing it. I had an idea of a series of paintings and I started to research images of both sex and art, hoping something would prompt my thought on my piece of artwork. While scrolling through images on the internet I came across a piece of work from the late H.R Giger who is my favorite artist, and remembered he had a set of works along the same line, of coarse these were Giger style, so they were more biomechanical and had a sense of horror in them. He called this erotomechanics.

Here are a few images of those.

http://community.fortunecity.ws/marina/fishermans/102/13Erotomechanics_V.jpg

http://www.museumsyndicate.com/images/3/21008.jpg

http://www.the-artfile.com/gallery/artists/giger/erotomechanic1.jpg

http://thelowdownunder.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hr_giger_csg048.jpg

These are the type of images that I am referencing from if this is what I am going to do.

Sex

I have chosen to go with the notion of sex. As I was away for the class when we received the brief, I had to go to the tutor and ask what the assignment really meant. Peter basically said "whats your notion", and straight away I said sex. He then asked "well, what is it about sex? What is it you like about sex, why would that be your notion".  I had no answers to this, and it took me nearly two weeks to decide on why, and what it was before I could even start my piece.
I had to evaluate my thoughts on the subject and question why sex was such a powerful notion to me. And in that question was the answer. Sex made me feel powerful, it made me feel, it was not, for me, the intimacy or the connection with another person, it was the feeling of strength, the ability of making pleasure for myself, the force and movement of sex is exciting and these are the things I want to hopefully capture with my piece of art.

Ideas

I still wasn't sure what notion I was gonna go with so I tried to come up with some random ideas on how or what piece of work I would form from a couple of the notions I had thought of.

Death- For death I had the thought of showing a series of photos of me doing my day-to-day routine with a noose around my neck showing that death has a grip of me always. I wanted to show that death has a hold of your life and your noose can tighten at any point.

Abandonment of God- For this notion I was thinking of doing a performance where I would sit down in front of the class and rip out pages from the bible. Unfortunately I felt this showed anger towards religion and this was not the point I was going for.

Loneliness- For this notion I wanted to do a movie of me maybe talking to someone throughout scenes then the audience eventually finding out that the person I was talking too didn't actually exist and it was my imaginary friend to keep me from being lonely.

Sex- A series of paintings,

Notion

What is a notion?

It was difficult for me to dig down within myself and find some sort of notion.

Everywhere I looked were negative thoughts and ideas. I kinda did a brief brainstorm on some of those thoughts.

Death is a notion I have always been fascinated with. I have seen it first hand, and it is something that everyone in the world must experience eventually.

Abandonment of God I felt as a young boy when my father passed away. At this point of my life I don't believe in a God and in retrospect I guess you could say abandonment of God is more my abandonment from a God.

Not caring, lately I have had the notion of not caring about things, anything really, at the moment I pay no heed to the suffering world, and care very little for politics and to be fair, people in general. I do care for my family and my son especially. Taking on this notion has been a big change as I felt earlier to this point in my life I cared too much, and it got me down. Now that I don't care so much, I'm probably the happiest Iv'e been in my life...ever.

Loneliness is something I guess everyone goes through, no matter how many people you are surrounded by, or how many of those people truly love you, you can still have that sense of loneliness, which I do feel I suffer from sometimes.

Failure is another thing that everybody will experience sometime in their life's. My only fear of failure is towards my son.

Darkness. I find darkness intriguing, I'm leaning more towards Horror, menacing thoughts and sin. Thoughts of being mentally disturbed, murder, and sex, somethings you dream of, or watch as a Horror movie and you sit back and think, I wonder what it would feel like to do those things.

Sex. Sex has been apart of my life since I was a young teenager...and I love it. The feeling, the passion, the power.

Next Assignment-Notion

This major project was an opportunity to develop a piece of work that issue from my own interest with respect to ideas, media, ways of doing things and aims. Our task is to generate an idea, research and develop it, solving any technical issues we come across along the way.

You have a notion.
The notion is one that you have when you are alone. We were to dig deep within ourselves and find that notion where ever it may lay, and then form that notion into a piece of work, experimenting with strategies and ideas to develop that piece.
We were to resist the temptation to sink into familiar ways of our own work methods as there is nothing we can expect to find there but DEAD THINGS!

Goal reached

I believe we achieved the goal to our task by showing 'Sex'

Sex is natural. Sex is intertwined with nature, it is pleasure, sometimes pain and it creates life, just as a plant would by allowing a seed to fertilize and grow.

These images were taken to show sex. To emphesis the simplicity of the act for a human to create nature itself, as there would be no nature without Man to give it it's name.

Install

More photos (second shoot)