Inspiration from Object Distortion

I was given a task by Isabel to make 10 pieces of works in one day inspired or related to my found object.

My found object is a paperweight from 18th century, England. It has a deteriorating painting underneath it which shows through the transparent glass. At different angles, the painting gets distorted, in turn creating new colours and images.

Inspired by Gary’s lesson on deconstruction and reconstruction of an object, I challenged myself to capture the distorted quality of the object in one day. 

This marbling experiment made me think about my initial idea of living in a bubble as a child and I tried to visualise how the inside of a bubble would look like.

I then made a small work inspired by the painting ‘A Homage to Velazquez’ by Luca Giordano. What struck me the most was his interpretation to Velazquez’s Las Meninas. The young child is seen to be holding a flower but critics have discussed that it very well may be that she is painting on the canvas from the other side. The way her hands are rendered, it seems to be as if she were holding a brush.

I used a childhood picture for reference and rendered myself, hesitant but trying to burst my protection bubble, overcoming escapism and creating an opportunity for something larger. Here I have explored the idea of a painting being an imaginary piece of glass.

Crystal Image, 2019; Watercolour and ink

These experiments led to the construction of my final pieces. Drawing from the distorted quality of the bubble, I aimed to create the spaces of protection using the distorted memory of my childhood home, which my family left 15 years ago. I tried to render the images in a panoramic view by trying to place myself in the centre of both the rooms, which were a form of escape from the chaos of family struggles, my kitchen and my bedroom. After many experiments I tried to capture the essence of what made me feel protected, whether it was the pink and orange bougainvilleas brushings their arms across my window, the red chair who I hated and loved so, the light above my bed which stayed up with me to read Enid Blyton, the empty glass bottles above the fridge, the coldness of water from the earthen pot, the box where I hid, the sunlit verandah where I spend endless hours looking at the world outside or the jackfruits my mother asked me not to touch or my fingers would itch.

I have highlighted the struggle that often exists between the private, internal and metaphysical reality that makes up the essence of each individual, and its distillation in objective reality. I was inspired by David Hockney’s landscape and architecture paintings.