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Professional Development Studio Practice 3301

Artist Statement

Full artist statement:

I am focusing on capturing farm animals within their enclosures to explore farming ethics and how this affects the welfare of animals.

I use acrylic paints onto small scale board as I love the process of layering paints to create different textures. I have been using small scale board partly because I am used to working small scale from lockdowns last year, but also to emphasise that animal enclosures are often too small, and the animals are trapped within a space. I have started to incorporate abstract colours in my work, even adding unnatural greens to my realistic paintings to show how unnatural it is to keep animals trapped for a show for humans, especially since they are the animals which are killed for food consumption. I am focusing on creating a large amount of paintings as often farm animals like sheep are grouped together in flocks so this, though unintentional at first, works well with my theme.

Within this work, I hope to make the viewer feel empathy towards the animals and make them consider how it would feel to be trapped within a space. Since the lockdowns last year, people will already have some experience of feeling trapped which could affect the ways people interpret my work. By focusing on farm animals, I want to demonstrate the fact that they are deemed unimportant, either being used for show or slaughtered for food for a large amount of humans. The animals featured in my work have different expressions and look directly at the viewer which is ironic as it makes the viewer feel like they are the ones in the cage. This also demonstrates how farm animals have become domesticated, relying on the presence of humans to be fed.

When presenting my work, I intend to have an irregular arrangement yet place them close together to emphasise the confined space that most farm animals have. Going to different locations of farms or animal sanctuaries to collect primary evidence in the form of photos and drawings is important as places use different materials for the enclosures, which is why my work features both standard wooden farm enclosures and wire enclosures. Although both create a sense of being trapped, the painting of the goat behind the wire enclosure is a lot harder hitting and menacing, creating a sense of isolation. My work effectively portrays the confinement that farm animals experience in their lifetime that the viewer can hopefully sympathise with. To develop this idea further, I need to paint a lot more paintings of animals in their enclosures to create a herd of animals so that I can make my ideas more obvious to the viewer. I want to consider my uses of colour more as making my work too abstract can distract from the seriousness of the subject.

I have done research into a range of painters including Henry Moore, particularly his sheep paintings as that subject relates to my work a lot. The works of Franz Marc and Andy Warhol were vital during my colour exploration stages and could help develop my work further provided I am more selective. I like the idea of presenting my work within a gallery on a white wall so that the viewer can fully focus on the work without too many distractions.

Short artist statement for website:

I am currently focusing on exploring the ethics of keeping animals, particularly farm animals, in captivity. This topic is so normalised in day to day life through farms and even animals in the countryside which we see when driving to places. I am hoping to give a voice to animals and allow them to communicate how being in captivity makes them feel and impacts on them. Colour is an important aspect of my work to represent how humans are often hypocrites who claim to care about the welfare of animals but don’t actually do anything to better the situation. Subtlety is important to me as I want to make people see through sympathy rather than disgust or outrage from violent imagery, the innocent imagery is very important to me. The idea of humans being regarded as more important than animals has always saddened me as we are similar in so many ways and animals deserve a lot more respect than we give them. There is more to animals than becoming a food for us to consume or a form of entertainment.

Short Artist Statement for Degree Show (3rd person):

Gemma Sly is exploring the ethics of keeping animals, particularly farm animals, in captivity. This topic is normalised in day-to-day life through farms and animals in the countryside which we see when driving. She has an intention to give a voice to animals and allow them to communicate how captivity impacts them. Colour is an important aspect of her work to represent the humorous irony of people who claim to care about the welfare of animals but don’t do anything to better their situation. Animals are more than food for us to consume or a form of entertainment.

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Contextual Research CPS 3302 Studio Practice 3301 Year 3

Contextual Post – Jackson Thilenius

Artist website – https://jacksonthilenius.wordpress.com/

Jackson Thilenius is an artist and architect who has explored a range of topics in his work including still lifes and portraits. I am mostly interested in his works involving the meat industry which show the suffering that animals go through. Although I am not exploring the meat industry specifically in my work and my work isn’t as brutal or serious, I feel that looking at the way he has depicted farm animals could influence me to try to make my work more serious to see the outcome and then if it doesn’t go to plan, at least I can say I tried.

This is a zoomed-in painting of a cow’s eye which shows cows being slaughtered in its reflection. This is quite a distressing and sad image which shows that not only are animals subjected to immense violence and brutality, they also have to witness members of their family or herd being killed before them. The title ‘next’ implies that the cow who is the main subject of the painting is going to be slaughtered next and it creates a sense of impending doom with no way for the cow to escape. This is definitely a message about the meat industry and makes the viewer feel a lot of sympathy for the cows. The details of the cow’s fur work really well and the colours are used to contrast with the silhouette of the slaughtered cows in the eye reflections.

This painting shows pigs in their individual compartments in a slaughterhouse. The main pig is making direct eye contact with the viewer which evokes a lot of sympathies as it seems as though the pig is asking for help. This is made worse with the other pig-sticking their nose through the bars as if they are trying to escape but there is no way of escaping. This could also be an idea of how small their individual compartments are. The blood on the bars adds a sense of brutality which again creates sympathy. I feel that my work resonates with this piece as I do paintings of animals looking/staring at the viewer although my work isn’t as violent or brutal as I am trying to be more subtle with my outcomes. However, I feel that it is important to see how the brutal side of the subject could look, most likely making the viewer a lot more uncomfortable than my own work. Also, this painting seems to be an idea about the meat industry and although my work may be interpreted as that, it is not a direct message about the meat industry.

This painting shows a lot of brutality and violence which is a norm in the meat industry. This painting reminds me a lot of the first painting of the cow’s eye and the reflection of other cows being slaughtered. However, this painting is a lot more graphic and shows the harsh reality of the production of meat. Although this is known by a lot of people, the actual depiction of it would make a lot of people very uncomfortable. It creates a lot of sympathy for the pig that has been killed as well as sympathy for the pig that is still alive who was a ‘witness’ to the brutal murder and is going to have the same awful fate as nothing it does will save it. The hooks and wires in the background make this painting a lot more sinister, even though that is what slaughterhouses look like (not that many people are aware of this other than from films).

Reason that I decided to research into Jackson Thilenius’s work:

I feel that the subject of Thilenius’s work links to mine effectively, although a much more violent and brutal story is told while I am trying to be more subtle in my approach. I find it interesting to see how many different parts there are go animal rights – predominantly being the meat industry and animals living conditions before slaughter. My own work is trying to create sympathy for the farm animals using emotion and the animals having a direct eye contact with the viewer – I hope that the animal itself can get the message across with their cuteness rather than doing art which is too violent or shocking. However, I feel that seeing other people’s approaches to the subject is vital in allowing me to develop my own work.

Thilenius’s work is very realistic and mine is more abstract but I like the smooth appearance of his paintings and the way that the pigs make eye contact with the viewer. A key theme in his work is a sense of impending doom with animals being aware of the violence that their herd or family have been subjected to and the sad sense that there is no escape for them. Their main purpose is meat despite that they are living animals who deserve more than that.

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Contextual Research CPS 3302 Studio Practice 3301 Year 3

Contextual Post – Dana Ellyn

Artist website – https://www.danaellyn.com/

Interview with Dana Ellyn

Dana Ellyn is a vegan artist who explores a lot of controversial topics and challenges social norms from religion to not wanting kids and our relationship with animals, particularly in the contexts of which animals we decide to eat. Although I find all of her work interesting with powerful messages being presented within her art, it is the animal subject that draws me in as it is relevant to my subject and her unique ways of working could allow me to develop my work in ways that I haven’t thought of yet.

As well as subject matter, her bold choices of colour interest me as the uses of abstract colour seem to take away from the subject, maybe as a way of showing how the animals are often overlooked by society and not deemed as important, which is something I have been exploring in my own work – although not to the same extreme levels.

This is a fairly large painting of a cow and a dog staring at the viewer. Although the animals are painted in a way that makes them look distorted and disproportional, I feel that the painting is very effective and unique. Since they are painted in a similar way, Dana Ellyn is showing the viewer that there isn’t much difference between them at all. I find the fact that they are staring directly at the viewer very interesting and this is something which I have been exploring in my own work but seeing it achieved in a different way is very inspiring. The green background works well as it reminds me of a field or a park, areas in which cows live and dogs go for walks. This painting raises the question of how can we choose which animals to eat and which animals to have as pets.

Dana Ellyn has had trouble eating meat since she was a child, often feeling sick at the thought of it and having to have her meat well cooked or she would refuse to eat it. Chicken, in particular, seemed to be a big problem for her – reminding me of a phobia that some people have of eating undercooked food, chicken, in particular, being a tough food. She was unaware that being a vegetarian was an option and so only took that step during adulthood, eventually deciding to go fully vegan.

In some of her work, she places animals next to the foods that they become after slaughter, for example, a piglet near a piece of bacon, to make people think more about where their food came from. This is an interesting concept as although many people do know where meat comes from, they may have never been confronted with the animal and byproduct side by side. To Ellyn’s surprise, meat-eaters were more interested in her work than vegans/vegetarians and so she hopes that her art can encourage people to eat less meat or become completely vegetarian/vegan.

In this painting, I love the fact that some of the bare cardboard has been left in the background and the floor as this looks incomplete and careless which could be a reflection of how humans can be careless towards animals. The colours used work well together and the different textures created with brushstrokes are effective. The gaze of the piglet evokes a sad feeling, which is made worse with the bacon next to it as the piglet could be looking towards the viewer for help so that it doesn’t have the same brutal outcome. When I first looked at this painting, I didn’t realise that the words bacon and pig were added beneath but when I looked closer I realised. I believe that this was added in such small writing because it doesn’t matter, people know what they are and still engage in eating meat.

Some of Dana Ellyn’s more controversial works involving the meat subject including ‘Baby Back Ribs’ are images that people do not want to see or think about. This shows that sometimes people who consume animals are content with doing so when it is out of sight, out of mind. But they don’t like to be confronted with the brutality or a dynamic shift that evokes disgust. Due to the outrage that some of her works got in the past, Ellyn tries to get her ideas involving animals across in a more subtle way with animals gazing directly at the viewer in a cute manner to try to get viewers to sympathise with the animals.

This is the painting that was mentioned above which shows a role reversal between humans and pigs. It shows a human baby which has a lot of its back flesh missing with pigs’ portraits hung up like humans have. Though I understand why this painting can be hard to look at as it creates a lot more uproar since it is humans being tortured, it also shows how brutal humans can be. This shock factor could be enough to put a lot of people off of meat, especially since the baby has such a pained facial expression. There is a large contrast between the light wall and the red table/bloody baby and flesh tones. I believe the colours used are to emphasise violence and brutality. I find the dark border – sort of reminding me of a vignette effect works really well as it makes the viewer zone in on the image depicted.

The two paintings above demonstrate some of Dana Ellyn’s paintings in which she paints one animal on one side and one animal on the other. Though they are both painted in different styles, with ‘pitbeef’ being realistically painted and ‘pug/pig’ being painted in a more abstract style with lots of mark-making and pattern, they both show how animals are quite similar and it is unfair to worship and care for some (the pets) yet not care and slaughter the others (farm animals). These paintings remind me of the ‘staring contest’ which I wrote about at the start of this blog post, however, I feel that these paintings explore the ideas in a more interesting way which captures my attention more. The choices of animals used work very well, as Pitbulls and cows both have long faces so their faces fit together well and pugs/pigs both have quite rounded faces. I love the fact that the animals are making direct eye contact with the viewer as this evokes a sense of sympathy yet also makes the viewer uncomfortable which is essential in exploring such topics.

Dana Ellyn Youtube video
  • Full time painter based in Washington DC. 
  • In the video she is talking in her studio 
  • Best known for her paintings concerning vegetarianism/veganism and animal Most current series called ‘look me in the eyes and tell me I’m delicious’ where she paints cute animals looking at the viewer with the intention to make the viewer not want to eat the animals as they are too cute
Screenshot from Youtube video
  • Shows some of her vegetarian themed art works – pig painting inspired by the mcgreet painting that says this is not a pipe. In her work she put the text ‘this is not bacon’ in French underneath a pig painting on a bold pink background. Ellyn sees animals and just sees animals but some people see animals and see food which she is hoping to change with her art 
Screenshot from Youtube video
  • ‘To bee or not to bee’- concerning the death of bee colonies and how when bees go away we’re in big trouble as we won’t have any food
Screenshot from Youtube video
  • Inspired by tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, ‘Goldilocks and the three meals’ – pig head is too fleshy, fish head is too fishy and the plate of fruit is just right 
Screenshot from Youtube video
  • ‘you’re gonna eat that?’ Little girl licking her fingers thinking the chick is a chicken nugget and the child on the right represents Dana Ellyn’s complete horror of ‘no it’s a cute little chick, why on earth are you going to eat that’ and then the child on the left represents people who are too young to understand.
Screenshot from Youtube video of Dana Ellyn’s studio

Reason that I researched into Dana Ellyn’s art:

I decided to research into Dana Ellyn’s work as she explores animal ethics subjects which is related to my own work. Some of her work is quite extreme whilst my work approaches animal ethics in a more subtle way focusing more on emotion rather than violent imagery. Despite this, I still feel that it is important to explore how this imagery can affect an audience and see how Dana Ellyn’s experiences with feedback could make a difference. Ellyn’s work is more focused towards the meat industry since she is a vegan but she also explores how we treat the animals we eat -farm animals- so differently to the pets we have -dogs and cats- even though they are so similar. These paintings really make you consider how similar all animals are and how we as a society are so disrespectful to certain animals as we have always seen them as animals we eat rather than seeing them as having a right to live.

I also like Dana Ellyn’s uses of pattern, detail and colour as these are important factors in my own work and so I could adapt Dana Ellyn’s bold colours to see how they affect my work. Colour is such a vital element of my work to draw on the humorous aspect of people who claim to care about animals yet don’t do anything to better their living standards or make any sort of change. Dana Ellyn’s paintings have animals which make direct eye contact with the viewers similarly to my paintings which I find captivating and make you feel sad for the animals – which is an interesting concept in my opinion.

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Studio Practice 3301 – Crit

Image of my final crit

For my crit, I decided to present a cluster of cows arranged in a regular way and a cluster of sheep presented in an irregular way. I did this to see what my peers thought was the most effective and to determine what route I should take my work next or develop towards.

Cluster of cows

This is the cluster of cows I presented. Due to a bit of a rush getting work finished for the crit, I didn’t have time to get them hung up professionally and so I used double sided tape which was a mistake on my behalf, I should know better by now but stress took over. I also wish I had used a spirit level as I can notice in the pictures how uneven and slated the pieces are. I wanted to create a uniform pattern to experiment as the layout of my work last term was very uniform. It was harder than I expected to arrange the diamond and triangular paintings as they were all different sizes which made mounting them quite difficult and so I feel going forward that I need to be more creative in terms of displaying them.

Cluster of sheep

This is the cluster of sheep I presented. For these paintings, I wanted them to be completely slanted and scattered to explore layouts snd hopefully get feedback on what works or doesn’t work. I arranged them in a way so that the lines of the enclosures in each piece connected and so it created a link between each piece. I included the painting of three sheep in one enclosure to see if people would feel more sorry for the sheep being cramped in a small space together or separately.

Feedback of my work from crit forms:

Descriptions:

  • 2 separate works
  • Bold colours, contrasting colours, bold lines, solid colours
  • Caged animals, animals in captivity
  • Mostly unnatural colours
  • Farm animals, meat
  • Layout on left really inventive
  • Cows and sheep
  • Farming
  • Surreal
  • Animal paintings
  • Small scale mdf
  • Not displayed uniform
  • Patterned layout
  • Animal portraits in unusual colours
  • Mosaic type presentation
  • Triangles, squares and rectangles

Relating work to other artwork/contextual sources?:

  • Pop Art – colours used and the combinations/sequences of paintings
  • Andy Warhol pop art
  • Stained glass windows
  • Franz Marc
  • Consider taking work down lino cutting due to the blocks of colour used
  • Henry Moore’s sheep drawings from observation

Questions about the work, feelings:

  • Makes someone feel like the animals are locked in as some of the animals’ eyes look sad and they are staring. Is this the intention of the artist?
  • Why are the cows uniform and the sheep scattered?
  • Is the colour suggesting something about how people feel about animals in captivity? (it’s unnatural) or the meat industry?
  • Someone likes the different shaped works, could there be more and a bigger sequence?
  • Do the colours mean anything?
  • Why the arrangement of triangles?
  • Since the animals are confined, it makes you question if farming animals is ethical
  • Why the colour choice?
  • Is there a reason why only cows and sheep are shown?

Feedback from Crit discussion:

  • Small painted mdf boards, layouts noticed – uniform one side, scattered on the other side
  • 2 separate paintings or 11 combined?
  • The cows are separated but the sheep touch in areas
  • Sheep/cows – different vocal points? cohesive pieces
  • Irregular shapes and unnatural colours – surreal, uncommon
  • Some of the paintings look like camera filters
  • Bright vivid colours show a happier side than black and white
  • The vivid colours used show a happier side but the animals gaze looks sad, contrast
  • Humorous, not reality
  • Cow side is more brutal through the uses of barbed wire
  • Sheep are more free, more subdued and pastel colours used
  • Cow paintings look like grids that are overlaid
  • Intimidation through animals staring at viewer
  • Cows reminded people of stained glass windows, mosaics, transformers, power rangers, birds, shaped like an animal
  • Not uniform, uneven, lacks precision
  • Explore my subject in lino print for blocks of colour
  • Zoom in on elements of a cow rather than just their faces
  • 3 sheep in one piece makes it look like a happy family – prefer them as individuals
  • Sheep look happier than cows – sheep are more free
  • Peta/animal rights
  • People feel strange about colour scheme, baffled by it. confused by it. Bad confusion, feels uneasy and takes away from actual painting
  • Purple cow painting most successful as it is simple but more complex way of painting
  • Shows how animals are more commercialized
  • Size is successful, no need to go any bigger as it will lose the confined aspect
  • Interested in seeing a whole wall of them grouped together, accurate depiction of a group of cows, herd on a wall
  • Aesthetically pleasing
  • Not about individual paintings, eyes move from one to another in a sequence
  • Colours, forms and shapes are important aspects of the work
  • Feel sorry for the animals – people can be ignorant, guilt trip, animals vs humans
  • Captures your attention, go in more, subtlety is important

Reflection of the crit:

Although initially I was happy with my crit, after the feedback I just felt that nobody understood my work and a lot of people didn’t like it even though I had worked from feedback on my previous terms work and where I was holding myself back. I feel that during my degree I have felt stuck and unsure of what to do, almost burnt out as I feel that the work I do is never enough and that I am always trying to please everyone but myself. I have to learn to change my view and just take it where I want to take it, criticism is there to help me develop and I just hope that I can pull myself together enough to get a good grade for my degree show. I will take all the feedback on board and try to improve my work as best as I can.