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Over specialism, I have worked with materials which are dangerous, and that I would like to consider conceptually for work in FMP. I have been working with metal, a process full of hazards. I would like to work with lead. Metals are a commodity, something very useful and valuable in the real world. For that reason they are seductive, something you want to touch, hold and own.

Lead is deceitful, and where it looks like a normal metal, it is actually extremely harmful to people, especially children. There is no safe exposure to it and it quickly contaminates your whole body. Because it messes up brain growth in children, there has been a correlation between lead exposure at a young age and crimes of passion, as the underdeveloped brain can’t perform cognitive or rational thinking. 

Working with this material would be meta, an actually dangerous process. I would learn about the themes of the work as I made it, its creation would be performative. In this case, I would have to consider: where do I want to position myself as the artist? I could lose the artist's touch and come as a powerful faceless authority, like medicine, the government or a company, or I could leave marks of it being made by a person and include the fact that I have put myself in danger, to put other people in danger. 

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In this work I weighed myself and using the average proportions of elements in the human body, calculated how much mass of each element was in my body. Reclining it on the floor gave this representation of my body little value, and defining it with just lines of tape, it tempted the viewer to step inside my body, observe its fundamental components and rearrange or destroy it if they liked. I like how it is arranged in just piles of unknown material, with labels only confusing it a bit more. I wanted to play with the substances, their perceived value and their actual value. 

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In the past I have created work that considers the viewer and accepts them as part of it. I have also played around with the body in a chemical lens. One of the works I have done this with is My Body, Broken Down, 2021.

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I am excited by Rebecca Horn’s interactive and performative sculpture. The work has two sides - as an abstracted arrangement and completed by the acceptance of a body. She creates elaborate systems and devices which have moving components.

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There is a lot of danger in the practical making of art and that is something I could look into. Formaldehyde in MDF glue, metal fumes, fibreglass, resin, plaster dust as well as all safety precautions when welding, casting and using machines. An example of an artist who I will look at about this is Rebecca Horn, an artist who fell extremely ill from using art materials, and whose work has obviously been impacted by this. Though I know a few of her famous works, I plan on researching this a lot during FMP.

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The electricity is an amazing symbol for tension at home. It also provides the sound which creates a dangerous sounding atmosphere. You hear the distressing sound before you see the work. People immediately understand there is a danger. It is powerful to put the danger in a place where people would normally be in. The absence of people in the work is powerful. Hatume said viewers often don't even want to put their hands onto the metal cable that keeps them out. Even though it is not electrified, they are confused, and scared, genuinely thinking something could go wrong.

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Mona Hatume is an artist that has worked with dangerous materials. From thin taught wires, to space heating elements and thin glass which could break easily, but my favourite is electricity, something she works with as a material or medium she can sculpt with, not a simple element as to do something else with. She has used this in her work Homebound, 2000

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Pakui Hardware works around the body, medicine and health, products and consumerism and technology to create futuristic looking installations. They have a focus on materials, combining synthetic materials with natural ones like latex or plastics and chia seeds or sea urchin spines. Their industrial looking frames and machines act as intimidating figures in a futuristic world. Pakui Hardware often isolate certain body processes or ideas and abstracts them, turning them into a weird mechanical system. I do believe that their work may have too much focus on design and their installations may be too static. That being said, one of my favourite elements in one of their works is a garden sprinkler filled with pink fluid, shooting out to the corner. The fluid is kept in an unlabeled industrial gallon container and seems like chemicals. I like how they are ruining the white cube space with the abject liquid.

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Going through the catalogue is a good way to learn about the appearance and perceived purpose of these chambers, fluids and apparatuses. I enjoy diagramming different symbolic purposes for the larger contraptions.

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I will also need to look at the real world for inspiration. Going to the Science Museum and looking at their medicine collection I saw that as time progressed, medicine got more and more specific, with mechanical tools being more accurate and technical, and with drugs targeting only certain specific biochemical features. As this happened, the body became more and more malleable. With modern technology, scientists can do crazy things, with only laws holding them back. I would love to dissolve morals and with little concern for life, see what the human body is capable of. After watching a couple episodes of “Surgeons: at the edge of life”, documenting live hour long operations, my view on the body has been impacted. The doctors are able to do so many technical things to patients, all while they are asleep, normally to achieve incredible things like for example capillary transplants. All while they talk about emotion, responsibility and nervousness as an abstracted thing. Noone is nervous in the operating room and the patient is emotionless. They are doing their routine job as if not considering the value of life in their hands. I think I would like to watch more of this during FMP to learn technical things about medicine and also to develop my own ideas about the way modern life sees the body. 

Seeing this medical collection, I also liked the materials used to construct machines and tools. The materials progressed through time from leather and wood, to ceramics and cast iron to plastic, stainless steel and glass. Medical equipment now is all single use, or cleanable. It all comes in units and is manufacturable. It all looks extremely white and bare. I have been looking at medical equipment company Scientific Laboratory Supplies Limited and their catalogues as visual research for my work. As well as scientific hardware, I think a good starting point is adopting the visual imagery of danger warning used in all sorts of situations. 

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Damien Hirst's real use of chemicals and expensive industrial materials makes his work scary to the viewers. The viewers don't understand the technicalities of formaldehyde and begin to question the tank's contents relationship to formaldehyde. In a short video of younger damien in the process of making his famous “mother and child divided” piece, you see him dressed in full rubber ppe and a full face respirator propped up as he smokes a cigarette and says “it’s trying to rot - and we're not gonna let it”. Seeing this is almost part of the work. It gives you an insight into how dangerous the process is, how disposed he is to doing the messed up things he wants to and the power and resources he has to do so.

In “Sometimes I Avoid People” (above) we see the theoretical holding of a person, one standing and one reclined. The figure is being fed unknown chemicals or gases. Maybe a metaphor for a certain emotion, the piece recontextualizes whatever its original inspiration was from and turns it into a dark industrial situation. The viewer is confronted by something they would only see in specialised locations and feel out of place.

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Recently, my work and research has become very modern and industrial. This has come from 80’s sci-fi films like coma, 1978 and David croneneberg as well as looking at artists like Damien Hirst and Pakui Hardware. If I want to work with toxicology - something which is already a science - and come from a place as if harnessing something very powerful, I need the outcome to look informed, maybe scientific and maybe industrial.

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Toxicology is a topic that interests me a lot. It fits in with my ideas and practice based around the body. It has considered the body chemically, as a statistic or a medical trial - all emotionless contexts. Dangerous substances are also something I have been confronted with often as I have been making my work. A material like plaster is extremely seductive to me. Beautiful as a powder, but also has the power to change physical states and give off a lot of heat. It is also something I like because I have created a lot of work with it. But yet it is extremely dangerous. It is dangerous as a powder and when sanded for your lungs, it can burn you when it's setting, and creates toxic fumes if you throw it in the bin. All this I have learnt from only word of mouth, and to be honest, makes me want to use it more. 

Though I could think about these ideas metaphysically later on in FMP, I would definitely like to begin thinking about them literally. A place to begin I think is creating installation using dangerous materials like plaster, chemicals, toxic metals and radioactive material. These installations would have a lot of consideration for the viewer, making it almost interactive and having their presence as part of the work. It would be great for the audience to forget they are in an art exhibit and fear that they have literally been put in genuine danger.

A big theme in this FMP would be fear and even paranoia. I would like to play with the audience and their fear. It would be great to use deceit and lying to fabricate this scary environment. My FMP work doesn't have to be about the dangerous chemicals but can also be about the irrational fear or the monitoring of them.

To research this I will love to read academic books. I have already taken out one about toxicology, one about developmental biology and one about forensic science.

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For this instillation I fabricated a hand made of screen printed and vacuum formed plastic. I used lights to project the inside of it outwards, turning the room to my body. This was extremely intimate and held a dark quiet and a sacred experience - in fact in Christianity, the church is compared to the body of Christ, so that entering a religious space is like entering the body of Christ. I also installed a humidifier containing my saliva. This has ideas of contagion and danger in the air. I also like the idea of one body entering the other via the air. I like considering the body in different physical states.

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I want my starting point for FMP to be toxicology and other harmful materials and substances. I think my best work is when I consider the body, but don’t reference it literally. I have enjoyed creating an installation revolving around one fabricated object, which has a lot of unanswered questions and holds a lot of attention, weight and value. An example is my work Close your Eyes and Breathe Me In, 2022.

I have developed the main theme of my work throughout this year. Creating a portfolio as well as participating in the 2-minute presentation project helped me put all my thoughts together and be able to think and talk about it. My main theme in my work is definitely the body. This may come from psychedelics and drugs, sex, ideas of beuty and ways of changing your body like working out, medicine and health and more. I believe it may also come from a malignant desire to control, manipulate and test the limits of the intimate physicality of a person, something I would argue is in everyone. The body is the most intimate thing everyone shares. Though it is very fun to work around the whole body I believe I need to get more specific in some cases, something which the FMP will be good for. In my 2-minute presentation I talked about seeing the body as a raw material I can personally sculpt or manipulate, and also as a result, the audience as something I could take advantage of and change. Though my work has developed into instillation, I believe I would still like to experiment with performance and video, as I love the few elements of this currently feeding into my work. 

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I want to work with dangerous materials. I want to create a room with lead in the air and another one with plaster in the air

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research!!!!!