Having made a body of experimental work from seed collecting to painting over photographic images, I now need to really evaluate it. What works, what doesn't work, and which concept or concept should the work focus on. To help with these decisions I tried moving my works to a larger space, more like a gallery space, to see how the works looked when given some room to speak for themselves and to see how they relate to each other.
One work I was particularly unsure about was Berry it seemed so robust compared to the others and I think the way the photo had been taken had influenced the way the work had come together. The best way to describe this is that the photo was a complete image with the bit of bush with the berry in the foreground as the focus, whereas, the Tree of Heaven and Gnarley Tree were photographed shown in the landscape. This seems to have a big effect on how the work turned out. For these works I wanted to show the beauty of the natural object by removing all of the other things in the background. Even though much of the background is also natural this is about showing one part, drawing attention to it, giving it a higher status than everything else in the photo.
Another aspect of these images I have started to explore is how one small part of the tree could represent the whole. This is what I did with the Gnarly Tree work, reducing it to just one gnarly branch. My question to myself is, do I make works which analyse natural objects and reduce them to their essence, or do I keep a more complete natural object, or, a mixture of both?
The final conceptual consideration I have is, I am also interested in the relationship between nature and culture, how nature fits in with the built environment. I think that maybe this is more of a future project, however, I may just make a few small paintings testing out this concept.
The main paintings of Tree of Heaven, Gnarly Tree, Gnarly Tree Branch and the photo of Grnarly Tree sit well together and as individual works there is a fragility to them. The most fragile are Tree of Heaven and Gnarly Tree Branch, the photos of detail from the first stage of Gnarly Tree also have some fragility and contain that 'essence' that I mentioned earlier, however, I think they are too busy and too abstract. There is something special about the paintings which do work and I don't know that I need to be too strict about having exactly the same process or approach for each work. Each work needs to be complete in itself but relate to the others.
Other considerations moving forward towards my degree show in June are; the scale of the paintings, the media I paint on, whether images are tiled or not and how I will present my paintings. I am thinking of creating a book of small paintings, but I also like the idea of presenting small paintings in a vitrine, this would fit well with my idea of specimens from nature.