Wire Drawings

So I was looking at my movement drawings and i started thinking, these would look great made of wire. At first I tried to work straight from the picture but I was getting nowhere, so I took each movement image and made them then stacked them on top of each other to get the final image.

Rebecca Horn

Rebecca Horn is an artist that I feel very fond of! I love her work with extending limbs and her work with feathers intrigues me a lot( I have a fascination with birds!)
One of her pieces "Extended Arms" reminds me of my silks piece as the woman is wrapped up in a red fabric so that she can no longer move. I find this very interesting as it is almost a juxtaposition to my work!

In circus when we want to create new ways of moving, we limit ourselves, eg. not allowed to sit, changing levels with every move, tying limbs so they cannot be used. I feel like this would work really well with sand, but first I want to try it with paper. I'm going to try and tie my legs up similar to the image, and then move around the space to "draw" an image onto the paper with paint or charcoal.

Drawing from the Sand

I did a couple of charcoal drawings from the sand, to see if I could get the same depth. I like the quality that came out of them but it changed the image I wanted to come out.

 I'm going to try different mediums to see what happens.

Movement in Sand

I want to start working with sand, I feel like it leaves such a great mark for movement, footsteps, sweeps, everything turns into a drawing! While I was working in Clifden, the group I was working for brought me to Dog's Bay, an almost tropical beach with a coral reef and white sands! I stumbled across these incredible markings in the sand, that looked like veins or trees. They must have been indents from seaweed being dragged out in the tide.

Feet in Motion

As an aerialist, one of the most important things is your feet! How they point, flex, grip and hold tell the difference between a beginner and a professional. I decided to make a piece about this using the motion of my feet in the fabric piece. I covered my feet in red paint (to symbolize the red fabric) and while watching the piece, I copied the movement onto paper.

I really liked how this turned out, particularly the fact that it almost looks like blood. It's like a metaphor for the pain that aerialists go through, particularly burns and cuts to their feet.

Movement in the Fabric

I found that from watching the fabric piece, the aerialists make some very interesting shapes that reminded me of life drawing. I decided to use one of the techniques I learned in life-drawing where I draw an image over another again and again to show the movement. I found that this works really well with the Fabric piece!

How the Body Occupies Space.

I've started focusing a lot more on how the body occupies space .One of the most interesting things for me about the body is how it moves. I've decided to work from the video of myself doing a silks piece. I feel like this is a good place to start as although the aerialists are only taking up a small amount of space physically, the completely occupy the space visually.

Marina Abramovich

I started researching performance art, as all my ideas keep ending up to be performance, and I came across an artist called Marina Abramovich. This woman is absolutely insane, but brilliant. The more I researched the more I felt connected with her, strangely enough. Marina does a lot of shocking pieces (one in which she cuts a pentagram onto her stomach and lies in a pentagram of fire, after cutting all her hair and nails off and throwing them into the fire, until she passes out from lack of oxygen and the audience have to take her out!) but when asked questions like "Doesn't it hurt?" or "Do you feel pain?" she she answers, "It's not about the pain, its what it stands for.". In my work as an aerialist, I perform at life-threatening heights and push through extreme pain, for what the piece stands for. I'm starting to feel that aerial is not just performance anymore it really is art! The message we give across the story we tell, its very similar. Here is a piece I performed recently. We were rigged of a crane at 50 metres height! I feel like this piece is relevant to my work right now as once we came on the surrounding space became completely still despite all the surrounding distractions and the fierce wind and rain. For those few minutes, we held every single persons attention!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/caw0tx75xl0kg6i/2012-09-29%2020.18.32.mov

Drawing through Movement

I came across a Google Doodle a while back where a dancer used her movement to draw the Google logo. http://www.google.com/doodles/martha-grahams-117th-birthday
This turned out to be for a woman called Martha Grahams 117th birthday. She has been compared to The Greats like Picasso and Einstein for her work which had brought dance into the 20th century.

Trash People

I started thinking more about how to occupy space with a human being and I remembered an artist called HA Schult. He made hundreds of sculptures of people made out of trash quite simply called "Trash People". He would line them up like an army in major cities and in front of major landmarks completely occupying the space. He said this piece is a reflection on ourselves, the trash we produce, how were treated like trash etc.“We produce trash, are born from trash, and will turn back into trash"


http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-trash-people

To Sense My Space

So our brief is "To sense my space" and after brainstorming a bit I started to think about contortion and enterology, or quite simply, stuffing a person into a box. After discussing this with my tutors, they suggested I play with the idea of filling up a space with a human body, but rather than very obviously with contortion to be more abstract.

One idea was to use my skills as a circus performer and try to occupy a large space using my movements almost like a drawing. This brought me to remember a great video where the artist took gymnasts and divers movements and turned them into abstract animation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe-C_rv3_p0