Salt, ticket and headphone

As I was using the image 'Salt Ticket Headphone' over and over again I wanted to produce and create more charcoal marks influenced by objects that I had found, adding more coding and figures from a variety of tickets and receipts that I have collected over the weeks. The charcoal drawings were not hugely effective however the figure marks I created worked well. 

By putting these on tracing paper I could layer them together to create different combinations of the information that I believe was an effective abstract identity. Because I used tracing paper each page loses slightly more focus then the last creating a translucency, blurring the information as you go further away from the first page. However I wanted to go back to what I had done in my original mark making and combine the charcoal with the figure tracing paper, but add in more figures then I previously had done. Similar to the artist Roman Opalka who uses transparency and coding in his work. 

Roman Opalka 1965

In the image below it shows that the identity of the individual has developed because I am giving the viewer more information. Bringing in features of the face such as the eyes and experimenting with colour and seeing whether this worked to my advantage are also furthering identity. 

Colour created a more detailed image and overall a more pleasing aesthetic of the face, the colour gives it a natural transition making it more lifelike. The element of colour gives the piece more of an impact and appears to evolve from the monochrome and mundane. 

Abstract Identities

To develop my marks, figures and writing I started to combine all these elements to create abstract identities looking at how the different combinations of materials, lines and figures could work together as one. Some were more successful then others, one being a combination of loose marks from the charcoal combined with the fine liner influenced by the string of a headphone wrapping around it. Also the numbers from a train ticket, the space around it the combination worked really well, I also liked how it moved from one end of the page to the other. I decided to use tracing paper, as a means of combining all these elements to see if layering one on top of the other looked good. Having not had any of the human form visible so far in my work I wanted to bring in an element of the human figure.

I did this by photocopying elements of my body, some stationary and some moving to have a suggestion of a human. The most affective body part were my hands as they have a clear outline and have a good structure to them, I looked at combining these with the marks and figures from the tracing paper images I mentioned before and seeing if they worked well as a whole. 

Documenting People

Moving on from mark making I wanted to make a variety of different accounts of individuals and was inspired by the information that I found in the receipts. Like Sophie Calle I wanted to record people in their everyday activities, however not with a camera but through journalism. I did this with continual line drawing with each word joining the next creating a long line of information, at a distance making it appear hidden due to the fact that it is hand written. 

Simply it is a fine balance between the distinct marks of the fine liner and the hidden words in the sentence. I was writing what I was hearing whilst not looking at the page creating a blind drawing of loose lettering and this in turn created an organic pattern across the page. The artist I looked at during this time was Vito Acconci, an artist who is known for using language as an art form and using words and their layout/perspective in an unconventional way to create structures. Therefore they become more then just words, they become the medium, the form and the line.

Vito acconci 'the city of words' 1999