I have discovered new themes and ideas through visiting the Frieda Kahlo and open systems exhibitions at the Tate. Lygia Clark has really inspired me into creating transformative videos and exploring new images of the body. Mendieta’s films restore to her sculptures and performances a similarly vital aura, their richness of colour, texture, and light reasserting the siluetas material forms and transformative power. I, just like Mendieta constructed each action and sculpture as a private act of meditation and dedication, allowing my work to be almost re-experienced. In her tactile, visceral films, we are brought close to the combustive material form of each silueta, as mud, water, flowers, gunpowder, cracked earth, tiny volcanoes, blood, candles, fire, smoke, and charred remains erupt and burn on the screen, creating the most metaphysical artists films of the 1970’s. Mendieta has fused the female body with nature in the most succinct terms. Such images depicting Mendieta united with a tree, a sacred container of the spirit is one of the most ancient images of primitive natural magic. To me her work holds symbolism which I fear is perhaps vanishing in our culture through evolution and industrialisation, woman are being torn away from the earth.I have loved developing my ideas and art but also myself personally and spiritually throughout this investigation. My performance at Rosebush slate quarry lead me to understand ideas Mendieta used as a theme throughout her work, of being torn away from her Cuban roots. Being born in west Wales, I am always, and was as a child sad to leave and at peace when I return. I have enjoyed working closely with different materials, soil, sand, rock, flowers, fruit and water. I have developed my understanding throughout this project and am keen to pursue my investigation further. I want to carry on my performances and experiences with different resources, and perhaps in new countries and continents, particularly Africa I was really inspired by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, who were exploring ideas of interactivity and viewer participation. Oiticica’s large installation project Filtro- for Vergara, New York 1972, invites the viewer to step inside. Oiticica invented his own personal classification system to replace traditional categories of painting, sculpture and so on. Project Filtro belongs to a type of art that he classified as penetrable: in translation, something that can be penetrated or entered into. Drawing on both the poverty and the vibrancy of the artist’s native Rio de Janeiro, Project Filtro is a multi-sensory experience: In the exhibition I moved through a labyrinth of exotic colours and textures, hearing recordings of poetry along the way, and even receiving a drink of orange juice at the end of the journey.My work
Pentre Ifan StarshinesValencia! Lithuania! Hill of crosses / Our black facial paint has been scraped from the underneath of a burger trailer
Funky, Dirty, Jackin House/ Big Beat .. width="425" height="350" ....... .. width="425" height="350" ....
Withnail and I, Out of Africa, The secretary is one of my very favourites, The Beach, Constant Gardener
Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi - The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman - The Teachings of Duan Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowlege by Carlos Castaneda - Healing the wounds, The Promise of Ecofeminism by Judith Plant - Earth Body, Ana Mendieta Where is Ana Mendieta.- I've just finished this book, and Waris Dirie is truly an amazing woman, join the campaign to eliminate FGM http://www.waris-dirie-foundation.com/web/e_index.htm
Mr Norman Cook