I'm off to Vietnam!

See you in a month.

This feels a bit strange, because it's kind of personal, but I have a piece up on the Smithsonian blog.

Photography Changes the Family That We Remember

I don't know if it's really worth reading for anybody else, but... it's there.

If you have any thoughts on photography, try submitting something to them. If they like it, they send you a free book and you get on their website.

I shouldn't be allowed to talk.

Every time I do, it goes horribly wrong.

if you would like to see the music video I made this semester, it is here:

[link]

NOTE: it is also not very good. And there are lots of dead things.

Semester is over!

I can sleep!

I can have fun and be happy!

I can get drunk while dressed as a pirate!

And I finally have time to come here!

So uh... don't be surprised if I reply to something you said six months ago. I have not been here much. And some of you leave such good comments, I would feel bad ignoring them...

While I am around for the next month or so, I would like to be more helpful than I usually manage. I'm going to start giving more technical information about my work, and maybe writing a few tutorials. (So tell me if there's anything specific you wanted to know).

This semester I was working mainly in film, so I know a bunch about that. Though I am also not very good at it, so... if my helpfulness is unhelpful, I apologise.

PS. who voted in my poll that they wanted to know about something else and then didn't comment?

just can't get it right

in the extremely unlikely circumstance that you are in Canberra from the 14th to the 18th of September, come along!

Yay!

the next few pieces in the Victorian series are nudes.

I think there must be three or four journal entries in my archives that detail my intense fear of submitting nudes here. That would be because I have submitted three or four nudes before. And yet, every time, I felt the need to be afraid and to inform you that I was afraid.

I seem to feel the need to add these qualifiers to reassure some imaginary audience who would take offence. I insist on bringing up "Oh I am so very nervous and ashamed" to reassure you that I do conform to socially enforced standards of modesty, and that it is only through repression of my instincts that I would dare defy any social code.

which is fucked.

I don't think there's anything to be ashamed of about my body. What size or shape I am is irrelevant, it's just an animal that carries around my brain. It is largely unrelated to who I actually am, never more than when naked.

The people who would judge me on the state of it, morally or aesthetically, are ones I would prefer not to be judged well by.

So why do I do this? Why do I freak out about submitting nudes, every time? Why do I feel the need to mention my fear so loudly and repeatedly?

To be naked in a public forum is to express your lack of shame, and your flaunting of those moral conventions and strictures on modesty, and perhaps that is what I am afraid of.

Well, this is the last time I'm going to whine about it.

I don't want to reinforce those social restrictions. They are only a part of me against my will and I'm not going to give in to them, or validate them to reassure anybody else.

My uni work for the semester is finished, I can go back to sleeping at night and I have time to submit things here! There are about 30 pictures, I will submit them here over the next few weeks.

But first, I'm going to try to explain my recent project a little, just to give it some context. It may make more sense then. Or possibly less.

so, we were asked to do some work for the Australian National Museum relating to their current exhibit, "Australian Journeys". The exhibit is sort of an Australian history in objects; old European maps from before the "discovery" of Australia, miniature portraits of Captain Cook, love tokens that convicts used to carve and send back to England, cameras that Frank Hurley took to the arctic on the Endeavor, etc.

_{the whole thing is depressingly colonial. Notice how the history only begins when Europeans come to Australia? There were people living here for 3000 years before then, who get barely a mention in the whole exhibit. Which isn't what I did my work on, it just really pisses me off (another girl focused on that. The museum people were not impressed.)}

The part that I thought was interesting was a display of the artifacts of a family in the 19th century. There was a collection of portraits of them, all prim and proper and Victorian. I thought I'd do something in the realm of Victorian portraiture. How prescribed it was, how the gender roles were played out for the camera. The way in which people construct an ideal world in their records. I began to think about what was left out of the exhibition.

I ended up with three collections.

The Photograms, which were about the dissolution of individuals into history. They were a sort of... visual metaphor? People fading and corroding and being absorbed into swirling narratives of history.



they were specifically photograms because of a class assignment. A photogram is an image made by exposing objects on light-sensitive paper. I used photographic negatives and layers of acetate and paint. These were also the first time I saw an actual advantage of darkroom over digital - for the most part I feel that it just comes down to how people prefer to work, and whether you feel the need to have gigantic prints. But the quality of these photograms is far superior in person - the colours are so bright and lovely, the black is so deeply inky, their screen versions do not do them justice.

The Family Album, in which I sort of re-enacted (reinterpreted?) Victorian family portraits. I did not exactly copy any particular photos, I sort of made an amalgamation of the features common to Victorian portraiture.




http://kittiquin.deviantart.com/journal/24232152/ Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:30:21 PDT

And once again, I am not here. Am I ever here? I have written so many journals to inform you that I am not around. It seems that I return periodically to remind you of the fact.

I just want to apologise for not responding to comments, or thanking s, or commenting on anybody else's work.

Sorry.

I just don't want to fail my courses. And you are so pleasant and distracting.

I have 2,581 messages right now. That is not becase I get a lot of messages, but because I so rarely respond to them these days. I'm not sure exactly when I got so behind. I imagine about a third of them are abusive messages about The Mess Inside, a third are for Sea Monster, and the 260 other works in my gallery account for the rest.

I do try to read every comment, and I intend to reply intelligently to each and every one of them sometime in the distant future. (Those lucky souls in the audience who recieved replies to comments 3 years old the last time I cleaned out my inbox know that I am serious).

... Plus I wanted to try my hand at journal CSS. Is it working good on everybody's monitors? Is it funny looking in bad ways? My monitor can't be trusted at the moment, it keeps recalibrating for no apparent reason. It currently believes that grey is pink, and red is orange.

This journal entry is feeling increasingly wasteful. What other use can it have?

Underappreciated work!

Why does nobody like these?

They are so much better than most of my crap.















it's not that I think I'm particularly wonderful (I won't get onto the topic of my vast inferiority, we'll be here all day), but comparatively, these works are among the disliked in my gallery.

which is a bit of a pity.

as they are some of my favourites.

we have so little in common some days.