hannah simpson - Punctum, Part I

Punctum | Part I

This piece was created through braking apart old pocket watches and stitching their cogs onto discarded portraits. The placing of the cogs over facial features, specifically the eyes, represents the loss of identity over time. The delicateness of the cogs and the threads holding them to the images represents the fragility of life and the use of images displaying the deceased reflects the inevitability of death. The use of discarded images was to question what makes an image important and to revive the forgotten. This also represents the revival of the dead through remembrance and presenting their photograph to the public. This act of remembrance reflects societies need to preserve life, through mementos such as post-mortem imagery. The act of defacing and piercing into the images reflects how the body of the deceased in focus are now decomposing and deteriorating, how the image is no longer whole, neither are the deceased bodies. Once someone has died what is the body classed as? It is no longer a human as there is no life left in it so can it be classed as an object? This idea of objectification of the body after passing is reflected in the objectification and materiality of the image. The use of cogs represents notions of people as machines, how mind and thought could be separate to the brain and bodily functions, that the inner working of our bodies have a machine like function, it is only the anatomical that differs us. There are also ideas that as a society we work as machines. How we can be brainwashed and commanded by politics, the government and media. We are taught from a young age how to act and function does this not seem like the initial programming of a computer; the control of someone else determining our future actions? These are the notions and questions that I am trying to discuss in the piece. The placing of the images into frames was to enhance the idea of objectification of the body. Through creating a series of images this is to project notions of family connections and enhance the lack of knowledge that the viewer has about the people in focus. This piece was influenced by the theories displayed in the book 1984 and ideas of mechanism.