Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilkes work is really inspiring.. She went from people a sex symbol to a very ill fragile person. However she was still very beutiful and did not stop working untill then end..

Biography:

Hannah Wilke (born Arlene Hannah Butter, 1940) was one of the first artists to use images of the vagina in her work during the 1960′s and 1970′s. She worked in a variety of different mediums such as photography, sculpture, installation, assemblage, drawing and performance. In most of her work, the body is itself a sculptural object and a means of expression to discuss issues related to the depiction of women in fashion and popular culture. In her photographic piece S.O.S - Starification Object Series, Wilke poses in a series of ‘glamour shots’ placing on her body tiny chewing gum sculptures that mimic her early terracota vagina sculptures. The work consists of 35 black and white photographs taken by Les Wollan in a ‘Mastication Box’, a game box with photographs, chewing gum sculptures, playing cards and instructions for play. In fact, her self-portrait photographs were taken by male photographers because the artist thought that the male eye focused mostly on her body than on anything else.

Hannah Wilke died in 1993 of complications from Lymphoma. For her final work Intra-Venus, her husband Donald Goddard documented the physical and mental ravages of the illness that was slowly taking over her body.

My own experiance with my looks..

Ever since i was litttle i have worried what i looked like, however I started to worry more about the way i look when i hit high school. Where i realised my natural self was not what people wanted to see. I was picked on for the way my hair was, beacuse it was long thick and curly. People would make jokes and call me afro hair or frizzy. Thats when i started to straigten my hair or cut it so it was easy to make less curly. i felt then people would leave me more alone and i started being excepted. Also i started wearing much more makeup. I look back now and think i must have looked like a clown but at the time i did it to fit in. This was not the real me.
I would be teased aswell about having hair arms or people would say id have a "tash" as they would call it.. which corsed me to shave most of my body hair off including my arms. After that people didnt judge me so much. I had a whole group of new friends. i started to wear what everyone els is wearing. i totally rechanged myself. But i was never happy ive gone though so many hair styles in a short space of time.. I have never felt totally comftable in myslef.
Then i had some kind of break thought. a change of view in how i see myself.. i started looking last year on how people recreate themself to fit to socitey, and it was amazing what i found. In most cultures people recreated themself to fit in or be more "beautiful".
From Chineese foot binding to neck steching in Tribes!.. Do they do it for the same reason as us? or not?
Then i looked at people who have plastic surgery to become "perfect" (whatever that is?) they had so much plastic surgery it was unreal! but yet still was not happy with themself?
There is many artist that deal with this idea.. Ive looked at Cindy Sherman, Jenny Saville, Hannah Wilike, Lynn Hershman and Jillian Wearing. These artist have really inspired me with the ideas they have had.

Thats when it hit me! Why do i do this? Become someone or something im not?
Im now trying to grow my hair back long and thick! i wear what i feel happy in.. whether its in fashion or not.
I somtimes even let the hair grow back on my arms ( but dont want to push it to far)

Why do we judge people?

I found this while looking online it is a piece a reported wrote, on the way we judge people. Also the discrimitation people have in the work place (in America). I find it interesting as i have done this myslef and why we do it, i dont no. ?

How many times do any of us go out and about, see some random individual, and leap to some kind of conclusion about their personality or character based upon what we see in just those few short seconds? Example: The tall kid over there must play basketball or that guy wearing female pants is either homosexual or in a hurry when he left his girlfriends place. Look at that woman's cleavage, she must put out. Hey, that Mexican guy must speak Spanish, etc.
If we are at all honest with ourselves I would be willing to bet that the answer to that question is all of the time. But why do we do it? Is it because we have to categorize people, or fit them into some kind of classification system? Who knows, we just do. I try not to when I see or meet someone for the first time, but every now and again I just leap to a conclusion about that person. Sometimes I am right, sometimes wrong. The fact that I make those kinds of judgments at all is wrong.
This is not only a local phenomenon, it happens all over America. So much so that studies have be done on the subject. A recent poll taken about appearance based discrimination in the workplace produced these results.
•39 percent said employers should have the right to deny employment to someone based on appearance, including weight, clothing, piercing, body art, or hair style.
•33 percent said that in their own workplace, workers who are physically attractive are more likely to be hired and promoted.
•33 percent said workers who are unattractive, overweight, or generally look or dress unconventionally, should be given special government legal protection such as that given persons with disabilities.
•Of the 39 percent who said employers should have the right to deny employment based on looks, men outnumbered women 46 percent to 32 percent while whites outnumbered nonwhites 41 percent to 24 percent.
•Those having personal experience with the matter produced this information. Almost 16 percent said they had been the victim of appearance-based discrimination.
•Of those, 38 percent said the discrimination was based on their overall appearance while 31 percent said it was their weight and 14 percent said it was a reaction to their hairstyle.
•33 percent of those saying they had been discriminated against said it was for some other reason.
Ideally we should just be open to new people and ideas so when we meet someone, let them show us who they are. Unfortunately that is not the way things work out. Everybody has that friend who upon meeting somebody at the same time as you that will make comments about them, usually after this individual has left. "I can't believe they dress like that," or "what is with that hair" are among some of the comments I have heard and said in these situations. If you do not have a friend like this then you probably are that person.
I do not like that when I make these assumptions about others, and laugh when they are made about me. Because you never can tell what another person is going to be like.
Many of the people I have known, and regularly associate with, for at least a year are to this day surprising me with different aspects of their personalities. You never know what any given person is like. Everybody deserves a chance to show that they are either a good person or not, that they are smart or stupid, and don't worry if you do leap to some kind of conclusion about a person you meet, you are only human after all. That is my excuse.

Cindy Sherman

I really enjoy looked at Cindy Shermans work, I find her work very intense.
She has inspired me to look at the human identy and how if we slightly change a feature on ourselfs we look totally different. Thats backs up my idea of me changeing my hair to create a different look.  I really Like her set of phots of a young girl, each time she makes a minute change to her face and the girl looked completely different.

Monoprint with painting

I then desided to make my prints look my pop art, i would add add paint. I used some pastic bright colours in blocks to make the work stand out more. i would like to use one of of the pieces

and maybe make into a pattern.

I started by just adding block colour to the hair.

Then i thought hair and face, to make the hair stand out.

Then i coloured the backround, but im not sure if i like it so much.
Maybe it was the choice of colours

Some more of the monoprints...

Spainish hairstyle.. When i was little i would have my hair like this to look my spainish.

Journey project for printmarking

My idea has come from the journey i take with my looks. I am baseing my idea on the way on the way i change my hair so frecquently. I recreate the way i look thought my hair i change my hair to what fits with fashion. I feel i hide behind my hair thats why i change it so much as i never quite feel happy with it.
I find it interesting how the identy of a person changes so much from such small changes. I thought of the idea of pop art and the way Andy Warhol captures icons and to me my hair is my icon. So for my monoprint work i explored basic lines and ideas. I didnt want to add detail to my face as i feel i hide behind it so i dont look no further.

This is what i produced..