Vincula (UCL Art Museum) 2012
UCL Art Museum is a museum contains vast collection of paintings, sculptures and prints dating from 1490 to present day. Group of artist from Slade School of Fine Art including myself, have been invited to create an exhibition related to the UCL Art Museum Collection. Each artist gets to select a piece of work from the collection and produce a new work. We named the exhibition Vincula because it means more than one bond or link to signifying an union.
Browsing through the collection, the process and language of this lion drawing inspired me particularly. The lion has a face of monkey, claws of cat and the anatomy is not right. This drawing is made during the 17th century and the artist has probably not seen a Lion before. Merely based on verbal or text description, the drawing ended up being a mix of his own imagination of a lion.
This process of making based on description intrigued me and I decided repeat the process in a more updated way. Firstly, without me seeing the image, I asked my friend Eunice to google "image of a creature" (picture below) and describe it through text.
Eunice's description:
"A portrait. It has a slightly squarish head covered in short shiny black hair, its ears high on the side. It is looking to the left, its eyes wrinkled with concentration, amber pupils reflecting in the daylight. The eyes are almond-shaped, not too big and rather close together. The nose is very flat, with nostrils half the size of its eye. It is cheekily sticking out its little pink tongue, as if making a face at someone. Its right arm is half raised above its head as in a wave, the arm covered in the same black hair, though the hair on its forearm and underarm is in light brown. Its left arm is half raised too, but lower, the hand folding down near the shoulder. A pearl necklace is just visible under the thick brown fur on its neck, and it is wearing a light pink dress, with a rose on the right side of the waist. The background is out of focus, only a dark shadow on the bottom right and a light blue strip behind the head. Otherwise it is all white"
Based on the text above, I made a drawing.
The drawing became something entirely different to the original image.
The googled image, text and drawing was show together as one work in the Vincula.