This project explores two major themes of life, (love and death), and attempts to form a provocative connection between the two through an explored visual statement. I created a dark body of work that conveyed the atmosphere of these two forces, and weighed heavily on my own personal experiences for inspiration and a deeper emotional input.
Love and death have become imposing elements throughout the history of the art world, including the stage, literature, music and film. Each of the themes carry a substantial amount of darkness and traditional romanticism, and are, in truth, damningly relatable. The two can be combined in a number of ways, the main example being ‘death by love’, such as suicide driven by heartbreak.
A symbolic figure of tragic love and suicide, Ophelia is a character in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, completed in 1602. Ophelia was the lover of Hamlet, and, when she received false news that he had met his death, she was driven mad by grief and ultimately downed herself in a river.
I decided to use the Death of Ophelia as the subject matter for this project, (a powerful image of a woman lying dead or dying in a river or outdoor area of water), and explored how I could re-envision this scene to metaphorically depict a particularly painful break up I had gone through in the past. In a purely figurative manner I felt as if the girl in question had committed romantic suicide due to our break up, which evoked the atmosphere of the Death of Ophelia.
The early experiments of this project involved me creating a series of photographs portraying a contemporary Death of Ophelia. I ventured around the rural landscape near my parents home carrying a mannequin that I had painted a vivid blue, in search for different areas of water adorned with plants and brambles. I laid the mannequin down into the water and let it gradually sink as I photographed it. The results were surreal and striking, as the mannequin resembled some kind of weathered corpse or mummy lying amongst the overgrown stretches of water, as if my Ophelia had remained there for a very long time. A stripped back and raw interpretation.
For the final stages of this project I began to experiment with projection mapping over water. I had taken a series of birds-eye photographs of a model lying in a bathtub playing dead, and then proceeded to project these images accurately over a bath filled with milky water at night. The cloudy white surface of the bathwater acted as a screen for the projected images.
The use of a bathtub seemed a fitting source of water for my interpretation of Ophelia, as the bathtub/bathroom has a dark history of suicide, and I was searching for a modern aesthetic to evoke the concept of suicide due to heartbreak.
When shone against the opaque milky white water the sharp images naturally blurred, creating a realistic sense that the dead female figure was literally lying just beneath the surface of the water, like a solemn sleeping child, foetal and delicate. The luminescent quality of the projected images also ignited the cloudy water, creating a sense that the figure was glowing, as if it were a ghost.
The experiments were successful overall. The blurred and faded figure of Ophelia glowing like a spirit over the surface of the white bath water, stripped of colour save a ghoulish blue and green luminescence, captured a minimalistic and grungy interpretation of suicide by drowning, and evoked an incredible trauma of heartbreak come to rest.
Companies
London College of Communication, UAL
- Education & Research