100 somethings in a week is a lot of somethings. I looked over my elaborate project and took inspiration from an animation I made from collaged drawings. It was several different parts of plants that made a character who moves in a peculiar way. The petals fold and hide the middle section. I enjoyed the strange movements and that the plant took on a personality and character, this is why I began adding further elements to plant drawings and let them evolve into their own characters.
In my one hundred screen grabs project I made digital and physical illustrations of anthropomorphic plants and created texts from note taking and stream of conscious writing. Taking reference from the surrealist method of automatic drawing, I created one hundred illustrations without putting emphasis on the meaning or overthinking. It was a visual exercise and creating these iterations allowed for my thinking and work to move forward out of its comfort zone and into something more exciting. The form the characters have taken are a self portrait for example the sunflower with hobbit feet draws reference from memories and different symbolic moments in my life. The duality of the illustrations seems important for allowing the project to grow. The cheese-plants probably come from the fact that my cheese-plant takes over my house and wont stop growing, I think this is an interesting personal lens to look through at the start of this project.
The overarching interest in my works is nature and how humans interact with it. The misunderstanding, the disconnect, the ignorance and/or the naivety. My position as a creative exploring these themes is not as someone who has the answers, I don’t have the ability to transcend language and understand plants in any way other than as a human. My position therefore is that of a researcher exploring how I can use design tools to begin to unpack this complex topic.
I will be using illustration and animation to progress this project further. Considering how different elements of the illustrations create duality and how the pairing of human and plant parts opens a further conversation. I think testing different styles and exploring the ambiguity of the characters created in the screen grabs in relation with written elements from my note-taking exercises will lead to further questions and iterations by creating a new dialogue and environment. I am interested in the way text and image is discussed in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, in Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage how the exploration of how message can change though medium. How Jenny Holzer’a application of found text to subvert or alter the meaning of the words and how she cleverly investigates this through her work. There are several essays from Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World that discuss topics aligned with the initial prompt.
Brief
Moving away from self- reflective illustrations and using ‘nature’, specifically plants as a prompt, reflect on the illustrations in the 100 iterations project explore how illustration, animation and note-taking can take this work into new territory and how the different media impacts the message.