Project Proposal

Through portraiture, drawing and digital media, this project investigates self and medicalised-imaging. By disrupting tropes of Renaissance portraiture and associated conventions, my project will use classic poses from self-portraits, appropriating the works of Albrecht Durer. I will rupture them through collage, medical imaging, photography and hand and digital drawing. Each self-portrait will be a layered work displayed on top of a light box. By doing this in layers, it brings our attention to the invisible illness made visible as a parallel to the x-ray and ultrasounds.

In my previous project I created a large-scale hand drawn self-portrait that merged ultrasound images with a digital collage of myself. I will be continuing with self-portraits but in a different way. I will be borrowing some ideas from history, particularly from the Renaissance; poses, ideals, soft colour palette etc.

Albrecht Durer’s self-portraits have been the biggest influence on my work. I studied Renaissance art last semester and became fascinated with Durer’s portraits. I have chosen to appropriate poses from his famous self-portraits. These portraits are from various stages of his life and they uphold the classical ideals of portraiture from the Renaissance. By mimicking these poses I seek to follow in his footsteps.

Through reading the book The Self-Portrait, A Cultural History; I have begun to understand the history of portraiture and why self-portraits are so fascinating to me. I am drawn to the medium of self-portraiture as a direct enquiry and reflection into identity. From James Hall; “Durer used self-portraiture to immortalize himself as the northern ‘artist-as-beauty’” (Pg. 81). The Renaissance portraits are heroic portraits, they represent the classical ideals of nobility and beauty. I aspire to present myself in a similar way.

However, the re-invention of the image is a means to find new pathways to discuss the effects of medicalisation, hoping to enable a dialogue which re-inserts the self back into the world, in a constructed and playful manner. I aim to present myself as a survivor, of someone worthy of being in a portrait.

In each of these portraits Durer is dressed opulently with his hair a prominent feature. Careful planning went into each aspect of the portrait. I have attempted something similar, through my costuming. The green outfit represents a medical gown, similar to the ones worn into surgery, while the other poses are my usual clothing but presented in a classical way.

Other artistic influences include, Raphael who created some interesting portraits of women. They follow similar portraiture conventions to Durer and have beautiful colour palettes. These portraits were of particular women who could afford to have their portrait painted. They were also carefully constructed and filled with symbolism.

Theodore Gericault’s “Portraits of the Insane” series is fascinating. Usually classical portraits are commissioned by high ranking nobles and the rich as they can be quite expensive. Here, Gericault has flipped the genre of portraiture and included mentally unstable people, people that usually cannot afford to have their portrait painted, people that are outcasts in society.

In today’s society, there are still stigmas surrounding mental illness and chronic illness. As visual beings, we question that if we cannot see it, then does it really exist? In considering my personal illnesses as invisible, the internal experience is hidden but the external physical experience is what everyone sees.

This project explores my everyday lived experience, investigating the effects of medicalisation upon the human body and identity. The interference from surgeries, medical examinations, and medical imaging. This is still traveling on the ideas that Petherbridge talks about.  The action of drawing and trace as mark, interrogating notions of visibility questioning whether there is any trace of the original left behind. 

In my experiments, so far, I have created reference photographs and started drawing these poses in a similar style to Durer.

Going forward, methods I will use include; digital manipulation, printed collage, drawing in layers using different classic materials (including charcoal, ink, watercolour), and drawing upon them digitally.

I will then present them in a small series upon lightboxes. These lightboxes mimic the same set up when viewing x-rays. The white light behind the image makes viewing layers possible, the same as x-rays and medical imaging enables us to see what is inside our bodies.

Through the collision of this with old classical portraits, I am referencing the clinical aspect of medical imaging and the beginnings of my own personal experience of medicalisation as a young woman.

Looking to contemporary artists, Godwin Bradbeer and Gillian Lambert are strong influences.

Lambert creates grotesque portraits of disembodied heads. The disembodied head is something that continues to pop up in portraiture and self-portraiture. The importance of our identity is placed upon our head. Here, Lambert uses similar materials to me and only focuses on the head.

Bradbeer creates gorgeous large-scale portraits and full body works in pastel. His figures are isolated and still as he explores the imperfections of the human figure. The composition of each work is similar to those seen in classical portraiture, his portraits feature the ¾ view and the disembodied head. Bradbeer investigates “the body as a manifestation of the human condition.”

In talking about his own work: “My existential conception separates the flawed struggle of rendered figuration from the impossibly perfected surfaces of commercial digital culture and in doing so seeks to find a testament to the enigmatic nature of our flawed human beauty. As a figurative artist who developed in my art with a constant endeavor after visual acuity, it is deeply ironic that in the twenty first century it should be the flaw, the error, the struggle for verisimilitude that identifies such drawings as works of experience”.

I am interested in potentially merging android or cyborg motifs together with these self-portraits. This stems from my interest in animes/films such as Ghost in the Shell and Ex Machina. An investigation into the search to continually make ourselves better, altering the physical body to achieve certain goals parallels the impact surgeries have upon our health when we are unwell. I find it interesting that Bradbeer’s diptych uses a similar pose to the one in Ghost in the Shell.