During my visits to exhibitions and galleries this term there were many artworks that caught my attention and inspired me, or made me reflect on my own work in the past.
Many of the works of art that I have visited during the semester in exhibitions and galleries have caught my attention and inspired me, or made me reflect on my own work in the past. At the same time I found that many of the artists had their own style or were changing their style and direction of study to find what they really wanted to do and were interested in, there was a big difference in style between their early and late work and basically no artist would always explore one direction, but that doesn’t mean that their previous designs or work wasn’t brilliant. For me, this has inspired me that we don’t need to limit ourselves to a particular direction of thinking and design, nor do we need to think about when we will find a real area of design that really suits us or interests us, but rather we should keep exploring and discovering, which means that we as artists and designers should not be limited by our existing knowledge and fields
In addition to this, I find that many artists design and create works that are themselves or are inspired by trivial things around them, such as ‘little shoes’ by Marisa Merz, who is an Italian sculptor who was the sole female artist associated with the arte povera movement.
At the same time, I find that some of the best artworks are not necessarily grand in appearance or made with ornate design elements and materials, but rather are more resonant with ordinary things that come from life, confirming that ‘art comes from life’, a good example of which is shown in Tate Britain A good example of this is ‘so much I want to say’ by Mona Hatoum, a piece that uses only an old television set and some broadcasting equipment, which is placed in a corner of the pavilion, and when approaching the piece, one can see the flashing images on the screen and the constant repetition of ‘how much I want to say’, the video So Much I Want to Say consists of a series of still images, changing every eight seconds, which show the artist’s face in close-up with a pair of male hands gagging her mouth and preventing her from speaking
In So Much I Want to Say the male hands, which gag Hatoum’s mouth, form a physical and visual barrier between the artist and her audience, which seems on one level to prevent her from being seen, heard or understood. They provide a symbol for a cultural elite which stifles the voice of society’s dispossessed, those who are alienated through their race, nationality and gender. By presenting images where she appears to be silenced, Hatoum exposes the predicament of political minorities who are silenced or ignored. Her ineffectual struggle to pluck the hands from her face contrasts with the persistent repetition of her voice on the sound-track, demonstrating that it is through her artwork that she has found a channel for her political ideas.
This work is a rebellion against the alienation of those who are alienated by race, nationality and gender, in terms of the finished product it looks simple but makes a huge impact, it reminds me of my own work ‘Escaping School Bullying’ about fighting school violence, I researched I researched people who had been subjected to school violence and collected their old shoes from the time they received bullying. When they put on their shoes, they would walk around or in the light of the doorway, it was a movable shoe within a certain range, but when the spring was straightened, they found themselves still affected by the school bullying, which proves my findings – school bullying can affect a person for the rest of their life, and numerous times when they tried to walk forward to escape, or thought they had managed to escape, they found that they could not escape at all.
After being influenced by these artists and exhibitions, I have some new ideas for my previous work, which I will probably continue to deepen and realize in the future.