CARDBOARD SPRAY PAINT PIECES

After looking at Gilbert & George's and Ryan Hawaii's spray paint works and deciding on which phrases I had come up with to use I started to spray on A2 pieces of cardboard. The idea of cardboard was very important as cardboard is more often than not a temporary material; whether it's for pizza boxes, delivery of packages or boxed wine, it is largely considered as something you will eventually discard. This is significant to my project as I have looked a lot at mortality and the fragile and temporary nature of a human life, very similar to the way we use cardboard. Below are all the finished results of the pieces, with a small description of the ideas behind them. I chose to use black, white and red spray paint, black and white because I wanted to portray a very bleak and deathly vibe, and the red to resemble blood.

The inspiration for the above was from Charles Saatchi's DEAD which I have previously talked about which is a celebration of mortality and an embracing of death. I personally believe that humans should live no longer than 40 years old, its clear that the body starts to decay at an alarming rate and in very serious ways, from dying skin to detrimental mental health conditions. If we were to live forever our bodies would be in a horrible state and we would all go insane and get incredibly bored, which is why I think that mortality is truly a gift.

One of my aims with these cardboard pieces was to make viewers shocked, make them think and even possibly offend. This piece is possibly the most controversial out of them all, death is something I have always thought about a lot and I have always been confused about everyone's huge fear of death, we all know that it's inevitable, surely accepting that would lead to a more relaxing and less anxious life. Slightly cliché but I put the word dying in red to make it stand out but to also make viewers think of blood, making it hit harder.

This piece is more of a reminder than a message, for those who believe in an afterlife people tend to assume that hell is not a place where they would end up and often forget that it's even just as real as heaven is (to people who believe in it.) The colours used are quite self explanatory; white for heaven, red for hell, and black for the contrasting faces which are about conflicting opinions on the two sides of the afterlife.

The idea behind this one was pretty basic, a cloaked figure, resembling Death but with a more sinister twist, portrayed by the face and flames suggesting a hellish environment. The figure is telling the viewers to sin for them, almost an invitation to hell, what the viewers think about this is obviously up to them and I want to leave a lot of the pieces quite open to interpretation as people's beliefs is what a lot of this project is based on.

This final cardboard piece has a lot of meaning behind it and is the only one without a phrase. The four horsemen which I have previously discussed are represented by the four horses, from left to right  the horses get more and more deteriorated as if they are decaying, this was to represent the demise of Earth when they descend from the sky and start the apocalypse. The tallies seen in red around the horses are a count of how many years I have been alive for, the inspiration for this came from the popular portrayal of prisoners scratching lines on the wall of their cells every day/week/month/year, counting down to the end of their sentence. By making a reference to that I have essentially used a prison as a metaphor for life, and as death is inevitable, we are waiting for our lives to end.