Recording Ballerina

 

~Melted Records and carboard support~

This is a piece which was inspired by Angelo Bramanti and Giuseppe Siracusa who are the creators of the L017 website which takes old unwanted things and creates something new with them. I especially loved their piece 4evaD. The idea to meld the records into the shape of the lower half of a ballerina came while eperimentation regarding how the records melted. I started with the skirt which reminded me of a ballerina doing a spin and then took it from there. 

I deliberately did not include the torso or head and arms of the ballerina to make it more general, rather than specific to a particular person or movement. Instead i wanted it to simply show the flowing and calming actions of these professional dancers using a medium that is so closely linked. After all, Music and dancing go hand in hand.

The base I made in two parts to try and mimic the way the spot light falls on these ballerinas as they dance as well as other performers.

As a secondary note, VERY hard to photograph a shiny pure black object!

Picton

~Oil on canvas~

A painting using oils and a photograph my mother took on a trip down to the country.

Detail of my favourite part of the painting:

Personal memories

 

~Ink and Acrylic on watercolour paper~ 

 Each drawing/painting is approximately 20 x 15[cm]

A series based on memory. I've always been interested in how we remember things. When I was given this topic I started some research into this and discovered that in fact our memories are only small points of interest. We store only a small amount of a memory, a series of flashed images which our brain then, when retrieving the memory puts into order and joins the dots, filling in the blanks.

I am planning on doing a lot more of these little images and adding them to these so that hopefully by the end of the full project I'll have about 50 of these small drawings.

Chair

~ Acrylic on canvas ~

Even though this isn't a fantastic painting that you would die to see it has some history in it. I won't tell you but i'll suggest that you check out the top left corner. That's real.

Artist's studio

 ~Acrylic on Canvas~

1m x 1m

Based on the topic of an artists studio this painting was for my TAFE class. It was the very first topic we had at the beginning of the year but I hadn't completed it till a few weeks ago and so here it is.  This is not my real studio as I don't actually have one and so I used my creative head. It was very difficult at first for me to come up with this idea and I had to first go through all the bad ideas to come to this. I went through the immediately obvious choices, through the semi-plagiaristic ideas and then onto the mind block moments. I got there eventually though.

I rather like how this turned out; I love the balance of the painting compositionally and because it was supposed to be monochromatic I enjoy the greens and blues [I know, not exactly monochrome]. Anyway, I enjoyed this, even if acrylic is a pain, drying so fast!

Enjoy =)

©Holly Cashman.

Any images on my blog are not to be reposted without linking back to here or without reference to me as the artist and not to be altered in any way without my written consent.

Casualties

A Triptych I created for my Photography class at TAFE. The assignment was to be a political commentary using toys as props. During the plotting stage of these photographs I was reading a book my friend lent me called 'Raising my voice' by Malalai Joya. The book recounted her experiences in Afghanistan and the surrounding countries during her early years and the Soviet occupation and then later into her adult life and the war between the Taliban and America etc. This really inspired me to create these images based on the Afghani war.

I wanted to get across that its not the Taliban nor the American people who are the casualties of this war. Since the start of all this, including the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, there have been hundreds of thousands, and even possibly millions of deaths, nearly all being that of civilians. Between the few months when we hear about an Australian or American soldiers death [which is extremely sad, and my heart goes out to those families who have lost  members in this war] hundreds of civilians have died. I wanted to get that across in this triptych.

I know that peace is not an easy thing to come to. Its something which is so fragile it can be destroyed by even the smallest miscommunication and its is not something one person can create but we can all hope that one day some kind of agreement can be reached which will stop the tragic blood shed.

©Holly Cashman.

Any images on my blog are not to be reposted without linking back to here or without reference to me as the artist and not to be altered in any way without my written consent.

ICONS

A Triptych done for photography with the theme of 'Icon' and what it means to us. I chose to focus on the Iconic golden halo used to depict saints as religious icons. The saints who gain this honour deserve it and earned the right to wear the halo. My thought was to comment on the way in which they came to gain this honour.

Most of, if not all of the saints were granted sainthood after their death for their acts which were ironically in contradiction to the ideas and thoughts of those who sainted them. Frequently these are martyred people who have been adopted by the very people who killed them. I always found it so sad how these great people lived their life faced with opposition and were only really treasured after their deaths. I also despise the way in which those that murdered them then turned after their deaths and used their martyrdom for their own good, to say that, 'we believed in what they stood for all along'!

My thought was to get across the pain and suffering which went into their 'sainthood' but, I think as a result of my failed acting skills the facial expressions may not be quite spot on. I will continue to work on this and hope to develop this idea in the future, hopefully with greater success.

©Holly Cashman.

Any images on my blog are not to be reposted without linking back to here or without reference to me as the artist and not to be altered in any way without my written consent.