Docile Flesh

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Docile Flesh

The purpose of this project was to demonstrate to my audience the limitless boundaries of the human face and show how something as vulnerable as human flesh can be stretched so far. I aimed to exaggerate an accustomed familiar form and in doing so unearth a new level of beauty that exists between convention and the estranged. I had no intention to disgust my viewer with my demonstration of docile flesh but to exhibit my ideas of beauty in the unfamiliar. I began by researching the multitude of ways in which we attempt to manipulate our own flesh to meet unrealistic conventions and then chose to exaggerate physical cultural stereotypes in the hope it would affirm the subtle beauty of difference. I also aimed to exhibit the power of light on human flesh, demonstrating the way in which it chooses to reveal certain details and conceal others, thus acting as a metaphor for the way in which we choose to present ourselves to others over social media.

Light controls our eyes it allows us to see or not to see of its own accordance. It may reveal to us the finest of details or choose to hide our faces in dusky shadows. Light is comparable to computer airbrushing technology, the only difference is that one is natural and one is man-made. Through this project I attempted to question what right we have as a society to censor what people see. Sunlight is uncontrollable, natural and ultimately unstoppable. I used traditional photography to aid my portraits, for the reason that it is the light that controls the outcome of my images and not the computer. The more we begin to let the computer and technology control the outcome of our appearance the more unnatural we become; this idea was mimicked through my own portraits abnormal appearance. Through my imagery I tried to question why would we want to permanently alter something that is already so limitless and beautiful in its natural form.

At the end f this project one conclusion I drew was that we only ever reveal what we want others to see, we only ever offer our audiences a slice of reality, as artist and social net-worker alike.