At the beginning of the second year I knew that I wanted to do more work about the body and us human beings. I wanted to explore the idea on how us human beings are constantly leaving marks within the world, I was also extremely interested in all the small marks and details we have on ourselves, I also wanted to explore how I could use myself as a material.
So I explored a few artists that produced work about the body and exploring the way we can use our body to produce work. Yves Klein ‘Anthropometries’ came up the most when doing my research. Klein is best known for doing his performance pieces with female bodies. He demonstrated art and performance pieces through using naked female bodies as a human paint brush. Klein conducted the women to cover themselves up in paint (in the famous Yves Klein blue) and then print themselves on the pieces of paper Klein had layed out, while the females were performing Klein also had a musicians play a single note for twenty minutes followed by twenty minutes of silence.
Yves Klein’s art work has always been an inspiration of mine, as its a very unique and different way of making art in the 1960’s. I think that the marks are beautiful and so impressive and imposing, another thing that I find so interesting and inspiring with the work is that no mark will be the same, they all contrast from one another as the marks are all so different. That’s what I love with Klein’s work is the layering of some of the prints and the messiness of some of it, where some of the paint has been smudged. You can also see a contrast between the colours of the paint from where the first mark was made to where you can see the colour becoming lighter from where the paints slowly being rubbed off.
After doing some depth research into Yves Klein, I knew this is something that I wanted to experiment with, so this was my starting point at the beginning of the second year. I decided to lather myself up in paint and begin printing my body onto paper, not only did I use paint however I also used purple shampoo which gave a really effective outcome. The purple shampoo stuck really well to my body printing really fine details from my body that not even the human eye can see, for example when printing my body with the purple shampoo it left hair marks that were on my stomach, it showed all the fine lines and all the blemishes, which is what I wanted. The purple shampoo definitely worked better then the black paint, even though the black paint did not work as well as the purple shampoo I didn’t hate the outcome, I still admired the way it was printed almost making it look a lot like Rorschach test.