Planning and Preparation for Assignment 3

Shaun Mullins (Untitled) 2020, Different Selves

My brief

The readings, research and exercises should have led you to think about self portraiture in a variety of ways. Some practitioners deliberately play with ideas of fluidity and multiple selves, whilst still being anchored to a nominal self. Selfies, often used as self promotion, are intimately linked to their intended audience.

Create a series of six images of ‘you’ that show different ‘selves’.

Reflection

Before you send your work to your tutor, check it against the assessment criteria listed in the introduction to this course and make sure that it meets all the criteria.

Criterion

Demonstration of technical and visual skills: Materials, techniques, observational skills, visual awareness, design and compositional skills.

Quality of outcome: Content, application of knowledge, presentation of work in a coherent manner, discernment, conceptualisation of thoughts, communication of ideas.

Demonstration of creativity: Imagination, experimentation, invention, development of a personal voice.

Context: Reflection, research, critical thinking.

Planning

From this brief I thought about the subject of identity and how I could project a sense of identity into a set of portraits. My first actions was to write down my thoughts.

To begin my thought process, I simply considered a layout for the finished pictures.

This exercise was to kick start my thought processes and I started to think more about the pictures themselves. It was whilst I thought about the different aspects that made up my character, I was drawn to the paintings I have in my dinning room which are students studies of Picasso’s cubism period.

In these pictures, I see multiple faces and this is what I am looking for in my project. I feel that Picasso had found a way to express a character through his method of cubism and so I decided to attempt to produce a cubist style photograph with the help of multiple photographs blended as a collage with the help of Photoshop.

It also occurred to me at this point that our identity/character is in fact a collage of experiences both good and bad. These experiences are in a form of a journey that we all make through life and as we move forward on this journey we change both physically and psychologically. I felt that a cubist portrait might help express this. Moreover, I needed to tell a story using the journey as a theme.

Artists such as Damian Hirst, Glen Brown, Sherrie Levine and Jeff Koons have used appropriation of other artists’ work and re-presented it in a new way as their own. Sherrie Levine has re-photographed famous photographs, reprinted them and presented them as her own work. I therefore felt justified to re-photograph old pictures of myself and re-present them in a new way. I chose four portraits, taken at certain key points in my life, then re-photographed them as, surrogate-selfies.

The first of my, surrogate-selfies, was taken around the age of two years old, I chose this image as it was the earliest picture that was recognisable as Shaun Mullins. The pose on the rock with my infant smile and blonde curly-locks, speaks of an untainted innocence.