Cover and Typology

Ruscha was fascinated by the actual physical form of text on a page, hence his obsession with signs and lettering. The books he published all had simple, factual tities, but the words were also selected by Ruscha because he liked them as words in themselves - for example he really liked the word gasoline and that inspired his series of gasoline stations. I am drawn to the word 'empty', and I also feel it's a meaningful part of my work with shells. I also like the word 'assorted', and I feel the subject matter and photos I'm presenting are assorted - not 'collected' or 'various'. I could have used a number, like 'nineteen', but I think this is too harsh and also too close to Ruscha's books.

Other Shells

Subject matter and image selection tends toward the uncanny, and has been useful in disrupting tendencies toward a narrative or index; however it does not lead the work.

Avoiding Narrative

There will always be a 'risk' (not always a bad risk) in presenting an unexplained body of work to an uninformed viewer, who will undoubtedly form their own assumptions about such an obscure series. Some of these assumptions may involve an unintended narrative, or a sense of some deeper meaning which the artists did not specifically set out to explore.
I can help obscure this tendency by taking a leaf out of Ruscha's book - and including seemingly irrelevant photographs which have nothing to do with an eggshell, randomly scattered throughout the series. For example, a glass of milk at the end of a photobook of fire photographs or a broken glass in a book of swimming pool photos.

 

Wolfgang Tillmans

Presentation!

I think this style of presentation really works for the type of photos I'm taking. It manages to present a cohesive body of work, while avoiding any tendencies toward a logical narrative, sequence or archive. While I would still love to create an 'art object' book like Ruscha, there is something about presenting photographs in a certain order that implies some kind of timeline or story. I want steer clear of this because I'm looking specifically at form, materiality, meaninglessness and exterior aesthetic.

Perhaps a table setting could be good, i could place a stack of the book on the table with some other photographs and objects

Other Foods

Claudia suggested that I explore other food types other than eggs/eggshells. I've returned naturally though perhaps not permanently to the lighting studio to photograph these objects, including avocado, rock salt, fortune cookies, peaches and pickled onions etc. I chose these foods for their texture, sculptural form and organic aesthetic. I've continued with the close up crop composition which I felt was most successful in the egg photographs, and really pushed to abstract the objects themselves so that the images rely more on form, colour, shape etc than the subject matter.

Studio

Finally starting to develop a cohesive folio, I've found that printing images - regardless of how refined/relevant they are to my final concept, helps me get a grip on which stage of development my work is at, and in which direction I feel I should lean as I go. Note to future self: Stop thinking about it and just print it! Pin it up and move it around and tear it down in frustration if it helps... just get it out of your head and onto paper so you can hold something real in your hand!

Suspended Sculpture

I really don't feel these are working, which is disappointing. I'm finding that I'm coming up with ideas without trying them out in a practical way - obviously once you actually make a sculpture like this and photograph it, the process will lead in an unexpected direction. In this case I don't think it was a good direction... The domestic background is especially difficult for me to work in because I'm finding that it seems irrelevant and skews the meaning of the image. The work is no longer about form, it is about the uncanny, which is not just a deviation but a major change of track. I'm not going to persue this sculpture idea just yet, but Bernhard Blume's action shots are intriguing and create a similar abstraction through movement rather than this staged, deliberate stillness which I find quite stagnant and suffocating.

Framing, Formalism, Simplicity

Framing and zoom completely change the entire photograph. Above, I've got a very material, formal, painterly image which relies on shapes and aesthetic, as opposed to subject matter/context like the image below. Yet both photograph are of the same egg in the same setting. There is too much information in the bottom photograph, too much going on. The egg shell, which is beautiful in its own right, is reduced to part of the frame, alongside other competing and probably irrelevant background forms. The above image is more confident in its simplicity. There is enough information there.

Hannah Collins

The Fragile Feast, 2011

"I realize that when we analyse a dish or a style, we notice composition and technique, but rarely do we realise that the product we are eating has a history. Hannah has portrayed what lies behind each of these ingredients and has pulled on the threads until the origins of a series of emblematic products have been reached. Each product implies a territory and reflects the people who have worked it for many years, often following ancestral techniques and procedures". 

Ferran Adriá, 2011 

Ed Ruscha & Photo/painting

my own photograph

Approaching photography from a painterly angle: form, shape, colour, light, 'art objects' (ed ruscha)

Ed Ruscha, Untitled (three kids in a bed), 1959

Asphalt Jungle, 1991

Photoshoot 1

I've been collecting egg shells for weeks now, and last week I finally put them to use in a simple photoshoot using crushed shells within a domestic environment... I'm trying to overcome my tendency toward the blank studio background by working in a natural space with tungsten lighting: lamps, sunlight, windows etc.

tungsten light: have to be careful of that yellow colour temp

Gel Medium

Is, hopefully, going to help me transfer photographic prints onto the surface of egg shells!

I'm planning to photograph at close range a variety of building/house materials like brickwork, weatherboard, stone, windowpanes, fencing etc. and then print these images (via a temporary tattoo style method) onto egg shells, which I'll then break and sculpt into whatever takes my fancy... perhaps the suspended sculpture I've been planning, or a giant broken egg shape, or just simple miniature mounds of broken shells. This sculpture might form a final piece in its own right, or might become a still life subject in a studio/real-world photograph. I'll discuss the ideological ins and outs of this big plan later - my head is going to explode with excitement!

 

Empty Egg Shells

Although I've been working (last year) on plain black or white studio backdrops, of these images (google) I am actually most drawn to the bottom two - with natural real-world settings which do not upstage the subject but add an aesthetic complexity which is quite beautiful. I think my natural tendency is to overcrowd an image/idea with too much subject matter/conflicting or confusing issues. To avoid this and help myself cut back this complexity I've been photographing on a plain background - but these images demonstrate the usefulness of a natural setting if it is chosen and photographed/framed intelligently.