My artwork takes a critical view of social, political and cultural approach to so called controlled and fake media. Often referencing daily life of a human being, my work explains how people gets sucked into a massive amount of controlled information. My works main idea is to show and bring a contemporary approach to a daily routine. The reason I used newspapers in my work is to show my audience how this years old medium is still alive and one of the main source of information which we read and get very addictive. Using ‘gif brings another meaning to the whole work with the movement of a newspaper over the face. Each animation consists of a place and – grouped around a specific theme and meaning. My works depict the curiosity of a human-being by showing the eagerness towards the paper and how they can get very hungry to learn. It is especially was my concern about some of the people I know are very addicted to reading and learning new information from the paper, tv or internet which is not proven true. In other words how todays leaders accuse some newspapers as ‘fake’, I wanted to raise attention to a recent issue. How this curiosity can poison us?

Materials: MP4

Selfie as ‘my data’, feasting as ‘consuming’ and explorations into conversions between data types.

In the digital age we have our selves and then we have our virtual selves, ourOnline ‘presence’. What does it mean to observe a selfie? Am I consuming theselfie? Is the selfie a curious feast? I am trying understand what it means to consume a selfie online from an Internet users perspective. What is the scope in which I (the internet user) can consume digital data? – In particular my digital data – as this is my selfie. Can digital data be manipulated and converted between digital mediums? I have decided to experiment with sound and photography, as these is both very common to the digital world of data.

Stage 1 – Flip my Facebook page and check out the html code. I take some of that code and using my keyboard I type it directly into recoding software Garage Band using the musical typing function as if I am coding a webpage or typing a letter. To get the sound aesthetic I want, I decide to use the digital synthesizers but I could have used any instrument the software has available. After this I refine the recordings and all of a sudden I have a soundscape representation of my data and by listening you are consuming my data in a new way, are you not?

Part 2 – This is what you can see – A digital snapshot of a performance piece manipulated with photo editing software Photoshop. The Performance piece enacts converting the image of an actual human (me) into ‘reflection data’ by using a mirror prop and trying to send that data into an actual cloud in the actual sky. Did I convert the data? I have tried ultimately to non-digitally convert my data. Taking inspiration from the digital process of uploading data online into the ‘cloud’.

Part 3: Fuse sound and image to create 4D artwork.

Like a feast, art is for everyone and should be shared.

The title of my work Pedagogy on a plate is a nod to food culture and reality cooking shows, where contestants use the euphemism ‘me on a plate’ to describe their signature dishes. This work quite simply represents my emerging identity as a teacher of art, on a plate.

Andy Warhol once said “Everything has it’s beauty just not everyone sees it”, and this holds true with this piece in a very literal sense. The work, a hybrid of two modern day cultural phenomenons the ‘selfie’ and the ‘food selfie’ shot on a smart phone, hides a feast behind its empty plate. Are you curious?

To reveal the feast, and see its full meaning, you’ll need to actively engage with the work through a smartphone or tablet:

1. Download HP Reveal app
2. Select Login
3. Enter username: curiousfeast
4. Enter password: 123
5. Select the blue circle at the bottom of your screen, and hover over the empty plate

The focal point, the Campbells soup can, references Warhol and the belief that art can be found in the everyday; art is not just for white walled galleries. The boot represents students’ prior knowledge, and the ball of wool the need for them to feel safe in order to share ideas and take creative risks - risk being represented by the playing cards. The woodworking tools are very personal to me as they belonged to my father, a man who spent most days of his life refining his craft and thinking outside the box, a man who inspired me to pursue the making of craft. The background noise, recored at a cafe, is demonstrative of the buzz I would like go create in my classroom, full of respectful discussion.

A selfie, in simple terms, is “a photograph that one has taken of oneself” (“OxfordDictionaries word of the y ear 2013,” 2013), often ephemeral and instantaneous in its conception, creation and distribution.

On My Mind reflects a love-hate relationship with something that is always on my mind; food. In particular, pasta has been chosen to obscure the face as this, and other high-carbohydrate foods, are notably demonized by social media and diet culture. Following the advice of a personal trainer, I didn’t allow myself to eat carbohydrates for a year, resulting in an unhealthy fixation. Spaghetti was quite literally clouding my judgement, yet eating it would somehow determine my self worth. The low-saturation speaks to how bland a time this was. The image is intended to raise questions about self-compassion, self-image and the messages we are privy to via social media. I would hope in the near future, I could take this selfie again with something far more colorful, vibrant and meaningful on my mind.

Most of students have class in the morning; usually they are still feeling sleepy, so some people may take a cup of coffee with milk in order to wake them up. I also do the same thing every morning because of my timetable. Coffee helps me a lot in making me have a clearly mind in the early morning. Day by day I feel that my brain is made up with coffee and milk. The reason why I feel sleepy in the morning is I always sleep late at night. At night, for people who are doing art, they may find that lots of very good ideas come out at midnight; I also found that as well and I prefer to do art in the evening, because lots of crazy and interesting ideas come out, I will spend lot of time to sketch all of the ideas down, the ideas are like the stars in the galaxy. So that gather the idea of night and ideas, I decided to combine coffee and galaxy together to see what I can create. Of course, sometimes coffee and the galaxy mix together will become something interesting. That's why I created these three paintings, and I think I really enjoyed them.

In considering my response to the theme “Selfie: A Curious Feast” I struggled at first to adapt the idea into a non-literal representation. I struggled because in my own artistic practice I utilise direct portraiture to construct identity within my artwork. I wanted to be able to look at the idea of consumption, in response to “feast”, and this resulted in me considering my own practice. Over the space of a few weeks I collected all the pencil shavings from the artworks I was working on for an exhibition. This collection of shavings was then carefully laid out in order to document an abstract expression of my own identity and self. By placing these shavings on a sheet and then photographing the collection I was able to display a way in which I had feasted (the consumption of pencil into a drawn image) in a curious manner. Interestingly, the artwork created also produces a time-line of sorts, documenting the residue of my artist practice.

As Australians, we produce 3 million tonnes of plastic per annum and less than 3% of this plastic is recycled. Within my work I have used my feast of plastic waste within a day as a medium to revel the extent of the plastic products we consume. This mixed media artwork is a self- portrait of my plastic footprint on this earth, exposing the amount I consume. The monstera leaf embodies a future where plants have evolved and adapted to their polluted environment. This showcases how pollution causes our earth irreversible damage and it needs to be addressed and stopped immediately. My art aims to evoke curiosity about this environmental issue and reveal the disturbing reality of what our world could become without change.

My aim was to convey how my mind is forever curious and I am constantly imagining new possibilities and creative solutions. The use of clouds represented the phrase “my head is always up in the clouds” imagining new possibilities and ideas. The mountains represent a desire to discover the unknown and create new works of music which also represents the progressive electronic music being released on the album.

I started with a portrait photograph of myself and used this as a basis to construct the outline for the “selfie”. I repeated this process with an image of mountains and positioned these as if they are spilling out of my mind.

I was inspired by the work of Spanish digital artist Antonio Mora whose work draws on themes such as dreams, fantasy, imagination, desires and memories in digitally manipulated portraits. I was also influenced by the album artwork of English electronic music duo Disclosure, originally designed by Roxie Pandora. The artwork, featuring outlines over images of faces inspired me to incorporate a similar technique into my own work. Thirdly I was inspired by the genre of electronic dance music and the experimental nature of this music. Artists are constantly searching for new ways to produce sound and are striving to incorporate the undiscovered in their work. I experimented by combining several images, textures and colours in photoshop with the use of opacity layers, masks and gradients to manipulate them which I then refined.

Rice grains, acrylic paints and a single light source

The Rice Republic explores the nature of self and the relationship between the material and immaterial. The sculpture depicts a part of the body of a rooster painted in rainbow pride colours, along with a cast shadow of my profile. The sculpture of this work was created with rice grain and acrylic paints.

With the expression of my identity and cultural background, I chose rice and my Chinese zodiac to represent my Asian heritage, which accounts for the cultural aspect of me, whilst the pride rainbow reinforces my identity as a part of LGBT+ community. Moreover, by investigating the relationship between the material and immaterial – the sculpture and the light in this case, I find a mediation between two ends of the spectrum, and this relationship could also be a metaphor for the unification of our souls and bodies.

I interpreted theme of ‘curious feast’ as a challenge to create something with various elements, colours and textures to become a ‘curious feast for the eyes’. I used three different materials and techniques to create my selfie. Using artist Frida Kahlo and her use of symbolism as representation as an inspiration I interpreted my own meaning and symbolism through the creation of my selfie. In the place of my features I used acrylic paint in bold colourful, strokes mimic my own mothers use of oil paints in her own artwork (a big source of inspiration for me). The colours of which are chosen to represent components of my skin tone, using photoshop to breakdown the original image I was able to extract the different shades. To contrast I’ve used simple pencil lines and shading to outline my silhouette to characterise my background and interest in illustration, I wanted to keep the outline stylised to symbolise my own drawing style. To represent my background and the literal background of the selfie, the watercolour flowers are observations of Clematis ‘Natacha’, which embody the of the unique and often misspelled version my name.

Curiosity always gets the better of me. If I visit someone’s home and see a bookshelf, I have to look. The books they choose to keep can reveal a lot about them; at times surprising. Many tend to display their books with pride like little ambitions or accomplishments, overlooking the fact that they are revealing the most intimate thoughts, beliefs, philosophies or guilty pleasures to a complete stranger.

I too have bookshelves full of books that at one time or another caught my interest - displayed in its very own study at the front of the house. Looking over them, I realised that I’m revealing more about myself than I’m comfortable with, but it is an appropriate representation of who I am. Some people may have been smarter and realised that they can keep their less flattering books out of sight, but I’m not that smart. All that may be perceived as dull, strange, predictable, frightening or immature is up on those shelves – a self-portrait in the form of books.