Planning

I need to log, record and reflect on my progress and planning for my final Project. However,
it needs to be evaluative, and reflective on my final piece as an aesthetic cultural artefact and its relationship to work in the forefront. I have to comment on links drawn between other innovative work and my own.

I plan to continue researching and studying the work of other artists who use fragmentation, refraction, reflection, repetition and symmetry in their work. I will also seek out also those artists who convey horror, repulsion, ugliness or the convergence or juxtaposition of those senses and their opposites; pleasure, attraction, beauty. I am interested in installation and the use of sound and motion combined with my photography. I would like to collaborate with creatives from other disciplines within the Creative Arts. I have ideas about creating something that an audience can participate in and interact with; perhaps setting off unpleasant or unsettling reactions.
Psychology deals with bringing to light those fears, experiences, thoughts we would rather keep hidden. The 'Trickster' according to Freud or Jung's 'Shadows'. In order to become whole, we need to get those fears out into the light and confront them.
My work reflects a need to create order and beauty; to smooth things over and make bad or frightening experiences and objects more palatable and aesthetically pleasing. Louise Bourgeois described  creating work as being her therapy. Yayio Kosama stated that without her art she would go mad. There seems to be a fine line between creativity and madness. Perhaps by confronting my fears and accepting  that life is never ordered and 'perfect'  I am administering my own therapy and portraying a sense of calm as  created by a mesmerising symmetrical image.
 Am I trying to say ' Horror and fear and misery exist in life, but you can avoid them, hide them, ignore them' But I am beginning to look back at the edges of my shadows and perhaps beginning to peep into their depths. I have not been brave enough to confront them face to face, let them fall across me and take my light...
 I am subdued by other peoples expectations, needs and demands. I have the role of the glue that holds my family and friends together. Just as I want to manipulate images into a more perfect, detailed and balanced whole, I am forever trying to do the same for people.

I have always liked installations and art that lure you in, then give you a shock, a jolt, an unexpected, sometimes unpleasant discovery or realisation.
To Jar is a good way to describe this effect.
according to www.thefreedictionary.com
To jar is to:
 disturb or irritate
to startle, unsettle, shock
to have a harshly unpleasant or perturbing effect on one's nerves or feelings
To have a sudden unsettling effect upon the mind, feelings or senses.

I do not have an unnatural fascination with death or the macabre, but it seems that I am being drawn in that direction. From my earlier research into the Memento Mori in Dutch paintings to the use of insects, meat and animal parts in my own work I am moving on to the fascination with the contrast between death and beauty.
 In the Dutch still life, there are little winged or multi- legged reminders amidst the flowers that beauty will fade, disease will invade you and you will die. In the 16th century the continuation of that message may have been-so repent and be a good Christian and earn a better, never ending life in heaven. But today the message is more like-so do everything you want, have surgery to look young, you deserve to have experiences and adventures, lots of sex with whoever you choose, a bucket list to tick off,  an expensive lifestyle, watch, holiday, car... Death will still catch up with you though! I once heard a woman discussing her plastic surgery on the train. One fragment was:
'I want to be the best looking corpse in the grave yard' which struck me as a very sad and unusual ambition!