Sustainable Prospects – Looking Back
My practice is concerned with how we perform in front of the camera. I am keen to discover how we act differently when a camera is pointed at us. How we perceive ourselves being viewed by others is a fundamental question that I am going to consider.
Until recently, I had thought my practice was purely about performance, however, recent events have caused me to consider other motivations for my work.
As a person, I appear confident and quite an extrovert. In actual fact, I am the opposite. I wear a mask to face the world, and in front of a camera, I wear yet another mask and can behave like a fool. My objective is to dig deep and understand why I feel I need to do this. I am not alone in how I feel. Through the development of the project, I intend to explore how we attempt to control the impressions that others form of us in social interactions.
During previous modules, I have experimented with different aspects of performance and representation of figures in images. In the first module, I explored how I could interfere with an image by adding thread and change an aspect of it. In module two, I explored performance in the creation of the images, whilst in the third module, I have explored the nude figure in images.
During the break, I set out to explore how we express emotion in front of the camera. I have looked at some of the research in this field and been using my husband as a model to test out some of the theories and experiment with facial expressions. Work produced during this time is shown in various posts in this blog.
I have also been reading Erving Goffman’s ‘The presentation of self in everyday life’. According to Goffman, our life is simply a series of performances.
Understanding his work will help me to formulate and develop my research project further.