Now Sleeping in these Peaceful Groves

I put up my 3rd year exhibition today (for this semester so far.) The exhibition consisted of 14 x A1 ink drawings. My work was about death mostly, the aesthetics and ideas behind it.
I chose to look at dead insects firstly, which you can see in my little trinket box (and in my previous post) I became really fascinated by how weird these creatures became in their deathly state, and when you looked at them in such detail. I sourced images of dead animals & I moved onto painting dead birds, dead foxes, dead deers, dead rabbits, and made a series of paintings (around 90 in total!) of these creatures, I found it especially interesting if they were twisted, contorted, rigid, somehow changed in their death.
I worked in black drawing ink for most of the images, but began to introduce colour into my birds, butterflies and deers. I was interested in bringing these flashes of colour in but also I was interested in the scale of the things, a tiny fox next to a gigantic butterfly, or a mouse as big as a deer, I think the surreal aspect of the paintings is very important.
The drawings ended up being very beautiful things, which seems ironic when you look at my subject matter, but I think that's sortof my point behind it all.

A Dream of Wild Bees

These are some photos I took for my current project, which is (in a nut-shell) about death. I've been working on sketches and ink drawings from them

Sleep Study

These are just some of the pieces I did for my Second Year at UCLAN.

My project started as a study of the sleeping figure, looking at tiny things like the twitches of the face or fingers as a person sleeps.

As they do, the project changed a lot over the few months I worked on it, I became fascinated by a more scientific approach at looking at the sleeping body, I read up on dream theories, and the medical state of a body as it sleeps, these are the things that influenced the final work, some of which can be seen here.

I became interested in sleep apnoea, and the fluid, dreamy state of a sleeping person, entwined with the harsh stark lines of this medical equipment which sleep apnoea patients have to wear as they sleep.

I used birds a lot in my images as well, this stems from a fascination I have with them anyway but also an image I became enthralled with during my research. A machine which (from my fairly BAD scientific) understanding measured the beats of a birds wings. The bird was wired up to a machine and I became so interested interested in this image, the birds wings fluttering and the wires holding it back to this machine, and also in how the machine worked - and the links this had to medical equipment which are used today to measure sleeping patterns, that I had to incorporate it into my paintings.