Fine Art - Installation

In today's session we started our large installation in our classroom themed off of the painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes. We decided to focus on the lighting within the piece which was almost theatrical and had a high amount of contrast, the use of cloth within the piece, the use of colour, and the focus on the limbs which cross over each other in a interesting formation. These were our focuses because they were the most prominent in the painting and they were what we found to be the most interesting to explore and reproduce into a 3D Installation.

The arms were made of newspaper, based upon a plastic mannequin hand which we also used in our installation, and were strung up with fish-wire. We positioned them into the places where they are within the painting with mannequin arm at the front of the display. What I like about this formation of limbs is the way they cross and overlap each other in a chaotic and violent way, that is accurate with the picture and the themes within the painting. However it may be too chaotic as you can't differentiate between the arms and at the moment look randomly placed and unorganised. Maybe we should try to find a way of separating the arms into their respective owners without the need of creating large and cumbersome bodies which would forego the focus on the arms and instead just the figures themselves which is not what we wanted to focus on in the first place. Maybe we could used coloured sleeves as they would add much needed colour to the piece and would not draw as much attention away from the arms unlike if we created bodies.

Here we have added the head on a separate box which could be used to represent a executioners block and a head with red, frayed fabric to represent blood. What I like about this part of the installation is the fact that the head is raised on a block so that it makes the meaning and theming behind the installation more obscure and harder to figure out so that it may seem deeper then it intended to be. I also like the way the fabric looks as a representation of blood because of the way it flows down and the frays create streak like patterns that both simulate but yet obscure the use of blood that is used within the piece. However the screwed up ball of paper that is supposed to represent the head does not work in the slightest and really needs replacing ASAP. Maybe we could use a mannequin head instead or something like a skull depending on the range of resources that are available.