AloneTogether
Final Piece, part 1 of 3 at Elements Art Space, Bath.
Art combining Baudrillard and Turkle.
My work at the degree show
Elements Space
Midlan Rd Bath.
Textile artists statement
My current art-textile works are the creative product of an intense obsession with figuring out ones identity in a digital technologically enhanced world. The textile pieces created highlight a ‘crisis of identity’ due to a proposed hybrid of the self which encompasses ‘human’ and ‘machine’.
At the time my own identity felt like it was being fragmented between the real and the virtual worlds, and the private/public domain with a pure sense of self interrupted by facebook messages and updates. This proposed the question ‘Who Am I?’ and ‘Who are we?’
My mother and I have developed a different relationship in the last few years, and it is this that first initiated reflective figurative drawings. The stitched abstract drawings of the female form stem from my own gender identity. Also, I believe the body to be the very essence of humanity and as an artist it is aesthetically organic. The expressive, pure shapes become more important to me than visual representation. The pieces created on the sewing machine also are a result of an amalgamation of human touch and machine. The pregnant female form relates to my fascination with human creation and a mother’s love as the very underlying fabric of human kind. Parental love cannot be digitised.
In all my criticisms of the digital and the simulated replacing the human, I took a pause in order to critique my own research, to take it down a separate path from my other art project. I began to look at the liberating effects of the internet for women and found that online forums were sometimes the only place they found that people will “listen” to them in distress, a time where it feels no one understands, such as losing a child.
“Listen” became linguistically important, because although the virtual appears to be a comforting place, which I will not criticise, in reality, there is no vocal human response; the response is perhaps visual but not spoken. The response is ‘cybernetic’. It is “Silent” (an anagram of listen). It also responds to the idea that we no longer truly listen to one another because our minds are constantly elsewhere, and often in another domain (Turkle, 2011). This became the central piece to represent my body of work.
The materials and processes in the sketchbook and final pieces are important due to the in depth contextual studies. Where the work is organic I allow for mistakes, because after all making mistakes are what it is to be human, on the other hand the mechanised aspects such as laser cutting are strict and have clinical precision. This also was a challenge to my previous method of working (collage). My textiles explore human nature/ mechanical computerised juxtapositions but also the harmonious aspects. Within the pieces, paper and cotton thread are used abundantly as natural materials. These also have a rich cultural history for the human way of life and are often contrasted in the pieces with electronic wires and metal: materials that have industrial, mechanised connotations.
“The feeling that ‘no one is listening to me’ make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.” Sherry Turkle, 2012
Art Statement
Alice Hannah Falvey
“Liberation has left us in an undefined state…It is once you are liberated you are forced to ask who you are” Baudrillard.
This idea, along with summer reading of Orwell’s 1984 initiated the questioning of identity and the self in the contemporary digital age. In the western world, we exist in a society where the virtual and real; private and public has amalgamated to become an extensive singular domain.
Am I a “Techno self”?
Where does existing in human form end and the virtual begin? This confusion adds to the element of identity crisis; the liberating effects of the internet are ironically reversed.
These notions are what currently drive me as a mixed media artist: the investigation of social and personal identity. The materials and processes used in the art work are reflecting the ambiguous and confused feelings; the contrasting use of paper and thread (organic) and the mechanised. The development pieces that have been created digitally are by using all aspects of the average computer, reflecting the context of the work; using the scanner often and at times even parts of the computer. Sometimes the computer makes faults, creating personified traits: is this fusing the line of human and machine even further and is it to be celebrated or discouraged?
All These ambiguous notions encompass my research in the last year of my degree, and have resulted in the interdisciplinary route of exploring text, laser cut, print and machine embroidery.
