Shakey, Slip Sliding Family. 1994-1998.

Like my pictures Family and Cars and My Room, the idea for this picture came out of the, ‘A Personal World’, project which I interpreted it as, ‘My Personal World’, in the Fine Art section of the one year BTEC Diploma in Foundation Studies in Art and Design.

​At the end of the project, ‘A Personal World’, I had myself photographed a few times in my installation. I also staged a couple of scenes based on American artist Edward Hopper’s work of alienation, by posing a student friend, Lee Vasquez-Rivera, sitting reading a newspaper and with one of the female Fine Art tutors standing looking away from him and then in the other scene, with Lee still reading the newspaper, the tutor also standing but looking beyond him. I took a photograph of each scene. I decided to use those two photographs as the basis for another triptych and which was to further illustrate Hopper’s work of alienation. I used masking tape fixed to an A2 piece of thick white paper to create the three areas of the picture. I used my own duplicate photographs of my living room in my bed sit flat and I also took black and white photocopies of them. I then cut out parts of the photographs and photocopies and arranged them into the three parts of picture, gluing them down in the process. I also scratched into the photographs to create texture and patterns and used graphite sticks, watercolours, and felt tip pens over the surfaces to add colour and to make the whole picture more visually interesting. Lines were used to extend the images of the two side pictures out into the empty space at the top and bottom of them, to balance out with its falling away of things and people, the central picture. Black and white photocopies of Lee and the tutor, were arranged so that they were not communicating with each other. The effect I wanted was to create, in a domestic setting, a visual disturbance and breakdown, of things shaking apart and slipping away out of control because of the alienation between these two people. This domestic catastrophe is echoed in the misspelt word ‘shaky’ in the title of the work. The whole picture was then mounted onto an A1 size white card. In 1998 I did some tidying up of the picture.

​Please see my back story regarding ‘A Personal World’ and my back stories regarding my pictures ‘My Room’ and ‘My Family and Cars’.