Multiples: Shoes, Condoms and Art

I’ve settled on the theme of Sex Work in the city of Edinburgh. I’ve been thinking about things that maybe represent sex workers and sex work over the 100s of years its existed in Edinburgh. The street is one idea, it can represent streetwalking and there’s all these nice old looking cobbles juxtaposed with yellow lines and mummified chewing gum. I also thought about condoms which represent more towards the prostitution side of sex work and shoes because we all know what a ‘stripper shoe’ is and maybe a certain kind of heel represents a certain kind of woman and is a very feminine thing itself. 

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese artist who creates these installations using donated shoes which have a memory attached to them and links them together with red threat symbolising the path we take through life. I think there really visually impacting as well as being sad and hopeful and I like this sort of idea about the footprints we leave as we go through life.

Luz Interruptus used condoms to create big water droplets in a space that was once a swimming pool, 800 condoms were filled with blue coloured water to create a sensory experience, this installation was poked full of holes by children but the artists didn’t seem that bothered about it, it was supposed to be interactive. From their website:

‘In this context, we wanted to carry out our interactive installation Prophylactic rain that doesn’t wet anything, with which we intended to leave a little lighted water in memory of former uses, this time we wanted to do it with drops of water falling on the deteriorated remnants of cement.’

You can read more about the installation here

I found more condom installations by Christopher Sacre who creates ‘babies’ by pouring plaster into thousands of condoms each creating a unique squishy looking shape which is given a smooth bottom to sit on and Bryan McCormack whose Preservation of Life installation at the Pompidou Cente used 80,000 light bulbs covered in coloured condoms as part of the centres AIDS campaign.

Personal Development Planning: Network Maps

As part of our personal development planning we were all asked to create mind maps about our artistic and future career pathways. This is a pretty scary thing to be thinking about but I just started listing artists that I really like and that have done work linked to stuff ive created myself. I was struggling a bit with the whole future planning thing but I watched this video where Alis Pelleschi talked about her experience at university and how she made contacts to get work after it. I suppose im saying that I want to be a self-employed artist type person and I know that this is going to involve some degree of self promotion and branding. Ive included social media on the map because that can be a pretty good way of letting people see your work and maybe meeting people to work with. I have this blog but I haven’t gone into any other social media platform so far so I might consider doing that soon. I have a bit on the map about the past, the kind of art I wanted to do a while ago, textile based stuff maybe thinking about costume design. That was what I was into when I first left high school but my tastes have changed and the things I like creating is different. My present section is all about my work process the now and ive included pictures of artists I like, work that ive made and how they all linked together. Id say where I am now I know the kinds of things I like to make and the artists that inspire me and the next few briefs we get are going to be all about that.

Multiples: Edinburgh Trip

I’ve gone off to Edinburgh with a bit of an idea of what i want my theme to be and some places that i want to visit. I was considering going on a ghost walk but decided to go on a tour of Mary Kings close with a bunch of other people. It was pretty interesting but we couldn’t take photographs which is something that would have been really useful so I might still go on a walking tour at another time, see some of the vaults. I also felt weird breaking off from the group to see things on my own so I didn’t make it up to Piershill Cemetary to see Lafayettes grave but im kinda drifting away from that idea anyway. This felt like such a long day and there was so much walking that i felt like i got all that i could within the day, its quite a leg workout. Here are some images that I managed to get and im gonna get back to Edinburgh at some point to get more, maybe more based on the sex work theme.

Some of the closes- lots of stairs.

The Magdalene Church and around the Cowgate

This guy chilling out at Greyfriars Cemetary

Multiples!!!

Second year starts off with a new brief about 'Multiples' which is also connected with the city of Edinburgh. I had heard about this story of a really popular magician who burned to death in Edinburgh in the early 1900s from a tv show but hadn’t really looked further into it so i decided to look the story up to see if i could get anything from it.

The Great Lafayette and Beauty

Sigmund Neurberger, known by stage name The Great Lafayette, was the highest paid performer of his time with waiting lists to see his performances years in advance. He died in a fire performing ‘The Lions Bride’ in Edinburgh’s Empire Theatre on May 9^th 1911 and was buried with his beloved dog Beauty, given to him by Harry Houdini in Piershill Cemetary. You can read more about Lafayettes life and death here.


As interesting as the story was my heart was set on the theme of 'multiple orgasm' looking at the way womens bodies are used as commodities in the cities, maybe looking at advertising, shop mannequins or sex work. Researching sex work i found out a lot about Edinburgh’s history of sex work from ScotPEP, from the Magdalene Asylum in which one of Burke and Hares victims had been incarcerated to current laws regarding saunas and the prostitution tolerance zones in Leith.

We’re heading off to Edinburgh soon but I have an idea in my hear of what I want to do so I’ll see what images I can get and where my ideas go then.

The Journey

This is a bit of a master post all about my favourite piece of work from first year, because im not a very good blogger and theres no point chopping it up into several posts now.

So this brief was to make a book based on the theme of 'The Journey' i had been looking at Molly Soda a lot and wanted to focus on that sort of girls in their bedroom idea. My theme was the journey from childhood to adulthood focusing on teenage years, i started by focusing on my teenage years which is actually a bit embarrassing to think about but it led me to another jump off point which were a set of tarot cards because i used to be into that stuff when i was younger.

The main focus of my book was to use the tarot card archetypes and turn them into teenage girls in their bedroom, inspired by Cindy Sherman and Alis Pelleschi.I focused on doing 13 of these portraits partly because of the amount of time it actually took to stage and take the photos but also because 13 is the age where you actually become a teenager and its also considered unlucky, but maybe thats just a coincidence.

Alis Pelleschi 'Super Fans'

Another artist that provided a lot of inspiration for this project was Rania Matar, a photographer who made a series of portraits of teenage girls in their bedrooms. Her work focuses mostly on women and girls, the spaces they occupy and the relationships they have with each other. I found her work really interesting and i really liked the visuals of girls in their rooms, their personality reflected in the mess and the things they chose to display on the walls.

Brianna by Rania Matar

 I started researching tarot cards, looking at the major arcana which is like the Death card and the Sun and Moon. I made a list of all 22 cards and things that could represent these cards or things that linked to my own experience.

With some of the the cards i wanted the image to link with the original meaning of the tarot, like the Fool, which is card Zero, can represent innocence or foolishness and sometimes the major arcana is seen as his journey through life. I wanted my fool to be a girl at the start of her journey into adolescence, surrounded by things from her childhood, packing her bag for this figurative trip. Death was more about the image of the skeletal figure, i was thinking about an emaciated girl obsessed by her weight becoming this deathly figure.

Once I had all my images made i started to think about way of editing them, i didn't really have any access to photoshop or anything so i had to think of a different way of getting a visually interesting set of photos. I decided to try out some collage stuff, printing out the photos in black and white and covering select parts in glitter or paint. I think worked amazingly well on some of the photos, making them much more surrealist looking.

Death card black and white version

The Temperance card was really improved by the glitter falling from the bottles and the misty background

I created a colour version of the zine and a black and white version with only the gold and silver glitter in colour. I have to say the glitter version was my favourite even though it took a lot of my time to scan in all the little collages i had made with the photos as well as having glitter everywhere in my house for about a fortnight. The photos themselves also took a really long time to do and im glad it was only 13 because theres no way i would have time for 22. All in all i really liked this project and really like what i made despite stressing about time and computer stuff.