do you want to see my old artwork

25/03/22 GDLP

hi! I thought it would be interesting to try and get all of this stuff in one place. I was convinced for so long that I was going to be an artist… and then I discovered writing about art instead. And THEN I discovered games instead-instead, and here we are. Making art is far away from me now. But I have made a lot of artwork in my time, and sometimes I find old pictures in folders and think about what it was like when I painted. I used to burn through podcasts, have little snacks, and time would disappear while I did my work. I stopped painting half way through university - - I went from painting to video and then installation. It was a weirdly emotional decision but also very conscious. I just got to a point where painting made me get too in my head about things. It was pure rumination time. It didn’t make me happy anymore, didn’t feel worth it. I stopped being able to hear the podcasts I was listening to and I’d just hear my sad thoughts and feelings instead. So I stopped! i made other stuff. And eventually I stopped making and became a writer.

Looking back on all of this as a whole, there is a theme of internet and emotion running through a lot of it. Not everything. But I can sense the lineage to The White Pube. Yeah. This is more for myself than anyone else but that’s what a blog post is for?? So here are the things I made a long, long time ago. Longgggg long time ago before I felt everything click in my role as a writer.

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STUFF I MADE WHILE I WAS IN SCHOOL before uni

I did a lot of commissions for other people, or presents for friends based on what their interests hence the weirdness of this list. A lot of the quality of this is terrible but are you surprised when i took them on like, the 2nd iphone lol

a black and white painting of lady gaga in the alejandro video, hooded in thin latex, serious and symmetrical

a black and white painting of lady gaga in the Telephone video where she has her hair moulded into an old school telephone and one end of it is covering her eye, and the curly wire is over her forehead

a little white girl walks on the beach in a pink and green flowery dress, colour turning into wavy sand, her curly hair blending in too, the shot is from above her, taken by the parent walking with their kid

a painting of golum from the lord of the rings, all blues and greens, dry and scathing, he's making side eyes at someone off the edge of the image

an oil painting so drippy and thin it looks like a strange watercolour, showing a man on a bench with a small white dog at his feet, park backdrop bright and green begind them

a painting of a white girl with brown hair, she looks pale and almost sick, sat at a dining table, chair either side, and a hallway disappears in the distance into dark

there is a tallship, the t.s. royale if i remember correctly, painting against a blue sky

a painting of the greatest woman in the world, sheila kelly, my nan, brown skin white hair, hand resting lightly on her cheek as she always does when you ask if you can take a picture of her

in this picture, my Nan stands next to the painting - she came to visit my end of year show during AS level. she's smiling

an unfinished painting of a white girl holding her head back, eyes closed, as if she is putting her hair back into water, but there's no hair painted yet, only her face

so random but it's a painting of hogwarts, tiny and at nighttime, boats with lanterns crossing the water over to the castle

a painting of a man with long hair leaning back as he plays a guitar which he's holding high, and his shirt is open and his chest is bare

a painting of a victoria's secret angel wearing a university graduation cap, which i think I painted for a friend when we were leaving school

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UNIVERSITY »» this is when things go from painting to video and then installation

a painting of Honey Boo Boo, a young pageant star with big huge blonde hair, makeup on a child and all the rest, and over top in painted captions it says i have chicken nugget power

on one side of the painting, there's a green alien which is actually an oil painting recreation of a digital painting in a snapchat screenshot, and on the other side there's two white girls with their heads back looking like thumbs

another painted snapchat screenshot of a white boy looking crazy with eyes wide, with a harsh black yellow and grey digital painting over him of a bee with a crown on and text over top says you can call me queen bee

a studio shot of the honey boo boo painting and one of the snapchat paintings in the central saint martins fine art studios in archway

that was all first year stuff ^

this is second year >

a blue cloudy sky with bits of trees cut up and floating in and amongst the blue, they are digital clipped images taken from the perspective of a game, standing so close to the tree that it breaks up

a pig is fying because it's being pulled up by a bunch of balloons around it with strings, in front of a dark green rain cloud, over a sunset where a white sun blows out into a rich yellow-pink-purple sky, and text on screen says press escape to return to world view in a pixelated style

stills from a video that only played when you held a fake hand that was spray painted green. in the video I sprayed my own hand that colour, keyed it out, and then exfoliated it off. it was kinda gory. i was so happy with it!

gab's hand on the left is spray painted neon green next to a fake plastic hand that is sprayed the same colour, viewed above a plastic sheet

the green spray paint on gabrielle's hand has been keyed out so it is a deep empty digital black, and she is wearing an exfoliation glove on the other hand, using it to scrub the black ie. the neon green off it

and now we enter third year:

I started to make weird digital collages that were like mockups for real installations I would attempt to make

a bizarre digital collage shows a scene that includes fake grass at the bottom, a baby gate, a palm, potato smiley faces with love heart eyes, a turkey dinosaur, a clock, a blood bag, a black outline illustration of a brain and a scroll, headphones, grapes, and an orange drink in a glass bottle

and they would end up looking like this – idk this pic is a weird WIP shot and i dont have a picture of what I actually did, which was empty a brain licker over the plastic so that it pooled in the half pipe jutting out of the bottom of the picture lol who did i think i was, i should have stuck to normal painting. why so many pigs?

I carried on liking the plastic. here’s a picture of an installation that had audio recorded by a fellow student, talking about the boy who cheated on me. my boobs were in this piece in true White Girl Art style

a white projection on the wall says i dont know if it is very human or not human at all, mid video, plastic on the floor below, two metal stands holding objects including wire and a print out of the fire emoji, with further plastic on the walls to the side holding up lyrics and blurred out pictures

the video i really wanna show i can’t because there’s other people in it and they might not wanna be on the internet

so then third year started and things just get bigger and weirder. here are installation shots and screenshots from videos

an orange board on the floor is holding a pink kids tent, and there;s a digital flame tilted to one side edited over the photograph. behind the tent there's an image of a seeping wound, and then a dust suit next to that

Gab is wearing a long blue wig which is inserted over a weird digital scene, sunny grassy background, sun bed, next to her a square of spaghetti with the glitter blue writing I L Y

another digital scene, gab is sat on a bed all red and Sims-like, blowing a kiss to an embedded picture of her Pokemon diamond save file that shows 316 hours of playtime

Gab is dressed with a hair net on and a pale pink silky top with floaty pieces at the bottom, like a jellyfish, and behind her there is a blue black white digital outline of a magic girl, and over top there is digital lightning that she looks like she is controlling with her hands

a green background with a white flag blowing in the wind, all digital, and in front gab is swaying her hips overlaid on a digital version of herself, both wearing black gym gear and a long blue wig

i made this after i was traumatised by tough mudder, I set it up with water in the big plastic bath, and then I read a piece about disease and pain at the microphone at the open studios night we had

in the corner of the installation, amongst the unpainted wooden 8 by 4s, gab is reading out a piece next to a microphone

and then the degree show

i wish i could show you the video i made, i’m still really happy with it…

a person in a bee costume walks down a street and subtitles say here i want to be leaning on something like an apparition in an exhibition

another screenshot from the video shows someone in a mickey mouse costume in the centre of liverpool making balloon animals, and the subtitles say like a pokemon daycare egg

i got more interested in the subtitles, the words i’d speak in the installation, the text i’d write alongside everything, and it was fine because the white pube began in my final year of uni so i had an outlet for all that writing anyway - - - but i do think about these things sometimes, and maybe i have made a video here or there, and maybe it’s even been exhibited under a psuedonym… who knows 8-)

Zarina and I are starting to write fiction behind the scenes as we work our way towards a book proposal and then hopefully a book. I think maybe that’s why I’m reflecting on this stuff now. Writing fiction is reminding of me of time in studios and bedrooms painting painting painting. I think I have a better head for this stuff now. Maybe one day I will paint again.

update: i couldn’t remember what the final degree show work was called and thanks to my friend herb shellenberger, i’ve been reminded it was called Death Row - - and he informed me it is on letterboxd which is MAD to me. The film I made was about the (true) story my sister and I share, where we both remember seeing a cartoon bee out of our childhood bedroom window. It pulled tongues at us. I will never forget :)

proof i am on letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/death-row-2016/

very funny stuff