When I think of paper, I instantly think of everyday, generic white paper. White is incredibly symbolic in Life and Death all around the world, so I thought it would be interesting to make a piece around that. In Western culture, people tend to mourn in black, where in many Eastern cultures they mourn in white. White lilies are customary tokens at Western funerals, where white flowers in parts of Asia as gifts are very ominous and symbolic of bad luck. After talking to my tutors and Owen, I decided to use white flowers to convey Life and Death. Owen also suggested singeing the petals to add the element of death, but then I thought of the tokens in Chinese culture, where paper objects are burned with the deceased as gifts to heaven. Perfect right?!
We had to hand in photographs as our final piece to our work. I decided to film and photograph mine as the film has a very sobering effect. I'm very happy with this project, and many seemed to really enjoy working with a new medium. For me, I'm just thoroughly enjoying making, and I look forward to more! My set up was a windy corner of our garden, several sheets of A3 white card, and a lighter. Not ideal conditions this time of the year but I wasn't prepared to burn the house down! I'd made something like 10 flowers, and had burnt some to a crisp in a test went wrong in the porch (don't worry, nothing/nobody got hurt), so I only had a few left to play with! But it turned out pretty well, and I'm really happy with how it went! The last photo is the one I submitted, and I've also posted up the film on Youtube here.
