Current work in progress

Slowly building myself a cupcake army.

Some more thoughts on Cupcakes.

HIDEOUS

I've been thinking about cupcakes too much and now I'm just beginning to really despise them. I want to make more art about them. I want there to be people suffering and terrible things happening and then I want there to be icing everywhere and cupcakes covering their heads, because cupcakes make everything better.

But they don't, they are just these self indulgent, horribly sweet little things which are so trendy right now and with the glitter and the over the top icing and accessories they are just hideous. They have curds inside and glitter and gold dust and hundreds and thousands, but what tops it all off is that they are individual, personal desserts. They are self indulgent, you don't share a cupcake, it's all for you. Miniature desserts, Ugh.

(image via: http://cutestfood.com/)

Installation experiments

Last week I did a few quick experiments in the installation room with the film that Tess and I shot during our first experiment.

I first tried to project onto the floor by angling the projector toward the ceiling and then mirroring the projection onto the ground. This didn't really work in the way I wanted it to. So I projected onto the wall.

I then found that projecting onto the wall actually worked well for what I was trying to do. Although the video was on the wall, it still felt as though the viewer was looking down onto the scene.

I then played with the idea of adding the silver tray, which we had used to put the cakes on in the original experiment, to project onto. There is something I really like about this, however I felt that it made the work harder to understand as you can no longer properly see what is going on.

So next I placed the tray on the floor. I liked this as it showed what was left after the experiment and was itself physical evidence that the experiment had taken place.

I sat in the room and thought about how the projection could become an exhibition. We had previously thought that we could have a picture of the cakes in the exhibition as a reference back to the original experiment and to show the audience how they tempted people. Whilst sitting there though, I thought it would be a much better idea to have the physical cakes there, much like the way that in 'Making a Scene', the way in which viewers walk through the room in Gillian Wearing's piece is similar to the original performance.

Thus I would like to host an exhibition with Tess in which there is a performance within a performance. I am hoping to do this before Christmas, just need to get some other work out of the way first and wait for the space to become available.

Repetition

I was recently thinking about the nature of repetition within art.

I am currently casting multiple identical cupcakes. Other artworks with multiple 'copies' have been:

Anthony Gormley's 'Field' series:




And Ai Weiwei's 'Sunflower seeds':
This last photo is one I took at the Tate this summer, of Ai Weiwei's Sunflower seed installation in the turbine hall.

Although their themes differ somewhat from mine, I feel there are similarities with the ideas and the method in which I want to display my work. Like Weiwei's my work will all look identical (although they are not), whereas Gormley's differ more significantly.

By making lots of identical cupcake pieces, I want to play on the cupcake culture and the way that cupcakes have become such a big part of society, it's a strange phenomena really, the way that people try to make lots of perfectly identical cupcakes, adorned with an excessive amount of decoration.

This seems to me to have similarities to the work of Weiwei, where he plays on the idea of 'made in china', as though his seeds look identical, they are all handmade and therefore are not. Nothing is really ever identical, yet we try to make series' of identical things.

Gormley's work too, although each figure is different, their identities are lots in the vast sea of figures. This makes me think of the way cupcakes have become popular and everyone has to have them. By following the trend, everyone becomes the same. Their identities lost.

My cupcakes will be like a sea of people who are all indulging in the same thing, whilst also being almost perfectly identical revered objects.