Good afternoon my lovely readers!
I have been busy in the last two days of school and we have ready started new projects. This week we're doing a workshop with two artists who have come all the way from North Wales to teach us. I'm sure the snow is a shocker to them because the climate there is still in the 40s-it was 9 degrees here today.
The projects that we're working on have to do with portraiture. I have created a portrait of a partner via an interview with her and I have just finished a self portrait today.
We talked about what portraits were traditionally and what they have to do with identity.
I was extremely touched by a video we watched on the artist Greyson Perry. He did 3 group portraits in the video that had to do with families in unconventional situations. This included a religious family living in a house of Jesus, a gay couple and they're adopted son, and an older couple where the husband had Alzheimer's. I was really upset and enlightened by the last one and cried as he captured the fragmentation that goes on in the lives of someone who has such a disease and the caretaker of the person. It's not just identity loss of one person, it's partly of another because we look for our own identity in other people.
After being sad for a while, I decided to think about my project or do other work but I couldn't let go of the sadness. I decided I needed to bake, unfortunately I can't do that here at school but it spurred the idea for my self portrait.
I created a recipe card as my self portrait. We were told to include 5 objects in our portrait so I included the ones I identify with most. Here's what you need to know if you'd like to bake your own Emma Oliver.
Xo,
Emma