Chelsea Swan

Working title: Expressing the lived female experience/ woman doing woman stuff/ the inner and outer self.

The aims and objectives:

Aim One: How to express the female lived experience using my own life as a area of exploration. I want to explore the lived female experience, the split between the inner and outer self, and the complexities of being a person made of so many experiences, expectations, and hopes. Although I am not all women the most natural way for me to do this is to use my own life and experiences

Aim Two: To find what it is that I am trying to solve. In a cycle I am working and thinking and trying to find solutions and answers in order to know what it is that is at the core of my work, what is the overarching issue I want to solve. I feel that there is a core to what I am searching through and that I will find it through exploration, research and reflective practice.

Objectives:

1. Autoethnography – Phenomenology – Psychogeography – I plan to use these three topics as ways of exploring the inner and outer self // the lived female experience through my own experiences. I am hoping they will enable me / give me a language with which to express, what it is I am doing. It is my hope that they will be a path through which I can better understand research through practice when applied to the lived experience.
2. Female crafts. I will carry on exploring arts that are traditionally relegated to the categories of female or hobbies and crafts. By channeling and adding to the long history of female creative practice passed down through the female line I will be better able connect the medium with the message.
3. Drawing as a physical, tactile and honest exploration, through mark making and play, with ideas. Drawing as a visual record of ideas and thoughts.
4. Research female artists and track where their work ideas intersect with the issues I am exploring of the inner and outer self. To record there discoveries in the blog and produce works that are in conversation with the work of others.
5. Reflective practice using the blog to record internal discussions on my work and process.
6. Reserch of the inner and outer self, craft, female artists,gender, and any other topics which arise throughout the project, recorders in the blog.
7. Creative exploration and experimentation, testing out new ideas, materials and mediums where appropriate. To continue to find items that can be used in my practice that relate to the female experience.

Context:I feel that my context consists of the female artists (and some male) my work is in conversation with.

• Simone de Beauvoir – Woman as a construct, created through history and myth, the inner and outer self.
• Sylvia Plath – self, inner worlds, identity, the weight of the gaze.
• Grayson Perry – Large works, textiles, femininity, gender as construct, personas.
• Cindy Sherman – The created self, Playing the part, putting on personas.
• Frances goodman – feminity, costuming, role play.
• Ghana Armer – Textiles, traditionally female crafts, sexuality. #
• Tracey Emin – Lived female experience, honest, no judgement, confessional, textiles.
• Louise Bourgeoise – mocks and plays with sexuality, use of the body, feminity, volition and intense.
• Juno Calypso – Hyperfeminity, fantasy, play.
• Helen Chadwick – sexuality, desire, female forms.
• Nan Golding – honest, emotional, lived female experience, documentation.
• Sarah Lucas – Bodies, femininity, fun and play.
• Nancy Spero-Woman as myth, rewriting, drawing, text.
• Fiona Rae: Drawing, performance, engaging, gestural, decipher, active participant in generation of meaning.
• Gillian Wearing- Masks, little performances, inner self.

Methodology: I will record and keep track of my practice through the blog and use drawing and mark making as a way of recording and exploring ideas. I also like to use mind maps as a way of getting down all my ideas relating to an issue as it helps me to organise and categorise and keep track.

In terms of the methods I use to make work, tactility and interaction are important. I am trying to make bigger things and things that involve longer to look at, more movement to see etc. Almost everything I use is from charity shops and second hand stores. I like the connection with other women and their lives, the lived female experience, wants, desires, consumerism, ways of expressing themselves, hopes and plans. I use play as a way of processing and subverting ideas.

Materials I use (and their semiotic connotations);

• Sequins-found, lost treasures, childhood, how can they see with sequins in their eyes.
• Spirograph-childhood, ADHD
• Lampshades/ Doilies/ Household items relating to women as decorative-women and consumerism as objects, buyers, producers.
• Buttons-lost treasures found, function and decoration.
• Beads- Decoration, adornment, glamour, preciousness, lustre.
• Rhinestones- cover the pain in sparkles, distraction, caught your eye.
• Nail Foils-self maintenance, adornment, decoration, shiny distractions.
• Embroidery cottons-bought from charity shops, connections to other women, other ideas and projects, potential no fulfilled, craft as feminine art history, relegated, passed down.
• Shapes-Childhood, identification, symbolic, semiotics.
• Inks- pretty
• Drawing- expression, movement, tactility, honest, the body in the process.
• Colour- Pink as feminine colour that was masculine, Blue as masculine colour that was feminine (absurdity of gender constructs) and Yellow, sunshine to irradiate the darkness, also the gender neutral colour of choice.

Outcomes: There are two outcomes I would like to pursue simultaneously. I find it hard to work on one thing at a time. I can find it overwhelming and eventually loose interest in the repetitive nature and the restrictions. However I also want to make something more impactful and on a larger scale than I have produced previously.

Outcome One is a body of work around the themes and could include making varied things such as:

• An animation- when artists make video pieces you go in the little room and they have you right there, you have to pay attention, there are no other distractions. I want to be seen.
• I have a Victorian child’s night dress I want to embroider on.
• I have some photographs I am working on from when I was a child.
• I have two masks and a head I have plans for
• I wanted to make medals
• I love the idea of making a marriage globe
• I am still working on two more lampshades
• I have started some goddess drawings and embroideries

Outcome Two is a larger piece. I have been working quite small but as Judy Chicago says when you feel small you work small. I want to feel bigger. I want to shout things. I want to make either a tapestry (huge) or a long running textile piece or paper piece, or make a whole bunch of lampshades where each panel deals with a different issue. I could make a story or a collection of ideas. It could be like a dietary or psycho geography type piece. I could include the everything of it all with the sparkles. Like a collage. I could add text. Life as a woman, interconnections. The difficulty of saying it all and clearly. That way I could lay it out in the way that my mind processes it all, all at once and important and connected. Psycho geography / autoethnography / phemenology piece. The inner and outer self. The histories, mythologies, complexities. Childhood, calories, dancing, BPD, ADHD, consumerism, everything all at once. The inner and outer with blurred boundaries.

Work Plan:

• One-Three: Course start, getting settled.
• Four-Six: Gathering sources, looking at what interests me and what direction I would like to go in, information gathering. Explore ideas visually eg. Consumerism and women’s bodies lampshade, or childhood and Spirograph.
• Seven-Nine: Mind maps, collect in all the ideas I am interested in, expand, develop and think about possible pathways. Work on the Study statement in order to focus direction. Also continue to experiment with materials and techniques.
• Ten-Twelve: plan out what I would want in the big piece. Test out ideas and decide what format it will take. Source materials and start to gather what I need in order or there to be continuity.
• Thirteen-Fifteen
• Sixteen-Eighteen
• Nineteen-Twenty One
• Twenty Two-Twenty Four
• Twenty Five-Twenty Seven
• Twenty Eight-Thirty
• Thirty One-Thirty Three
• Thirty Four-Thirty Six
• Thirty Seven-Thirty Nine
• Forty-Forty Two
• Forty Three-Forty Five
• Forty Six-Forty Eight
• Forty Nine-Fifty One
• Fifty Two- Fifty Four
• Fifty Five- Fifty Seven
• Fifty Eight-Sixty

Bibliography: