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The theme for this fine art brief was ‘transformation and decay’. I began by writing down my initial ideas. I like working with words that impli a viceral response, the word ‘decay’ sparked the thought of something ‘diying’ and ‘rotting’. I also wrote down that I would like to work with an element from nature. I thought of basing my piece around the desert and a contrasting enviroment such as the artic. The brief required to have two outcome pieces.

I carried out a few sheets of bananas and peppers. I initially wanted to base my piece around a turkey. Turkeys made me think of Thanksgiving and Christmas, which I as a vegan associate with death and decay. The sheet above shows the process of amalgamating a banan with a human femela body. I used a maniquin from the class to base it on. In the lower left corner I drew what reminded me of a baby. I decided to work with the idea of using babies as a focal point for the project. We associate babies with innocence. I associate turkeys with decay and death. Putting both together for me represented how the process of transformation in my thinking changed form seeing animals as a comodity to seeing them as innocent beings.

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TRANSFORMATION AND DECAY

I explored how a baby with bruising banana skin would look like, what a human/turkey, a human/cow baby and a human/pig baby would look like. For the turkey baby I had very clear that I didn’t want it to hava a head as turkeys in supermarkets are not sold with their head. I thought this was a powerful image that would question the viewer.

Here is a page of the process I went through to develop the baby/turkey amalgamation. In retrospective I should have bough a baby doll as the images I used to base the baby shapes from where stock images from the internet. I did not have acess to a real life baby, this would have probably improved my work. In the future I will make sure to have an object to draw from life.

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Here are the two final outcome pieces:

A2 cardboard sheet. The materials I used for the turkey were acrylic paint, chalk pastels, pva glue and a metal wire mesh. The mesh was used to create the texture that bird’s skin has when plucked. The pastels were used to build form. I used pastels to make ‘steam’ like marks because I wanted the turkey to appear as it had come out of the oven recently. I chose a grey background as it is a cool hue that it would make the pink tones stand out, grey is bleak, remisitent of death and ugliness.

A2 sheet. I wanted the banana baby to almost seem like it was ill, decaying.

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