FAIL!
It’s not going the way I thought. The image is not coming through.
I realize what works with the debris netting pieces is that the image is recognized first, and then the elements get discovered. Right now, it looks like a small field of xs in a circle shape.
I wanted to do a portrait of myself. A friend very kindly said “you can get away with it looking like a moon”. You can kind of tell by the photos below. In person, the image is not discernable at all. For it to work, it needs to be much bigger. I am limited with the amount of tiles I have, and the amount of time to work on it by myself. I will have to find a solution.
The pieces look great as the grass and weeds soften the piece and it look like its sinking or becoming a piece of the earth. There is a beauty to the piece in its presentation. I am excited to share it. Just gotta figure out how to get the overall image to be identifiable.
Maybe its not a portrait. Maybe another image can do the work - the message that I am looking for with the portrait. How to acknowledge my whiteness, acknowledge people that walk this earth. What am I acknowledging? Something that collectively we have chosen, committed to burying, shaming. The opposite of shame is pride. I am poking at white pride. The breaker is humility. What is an image of humility that can acknowledge the pain that whiteness has caused on this land?
My approach is that I am going to try making a different self portait with just hashes - a leg of the X. Maybe that will give enough variation to give details so it starts to look like a face.
Failure, or an art not coming out the way its envisioned, is the exciting part of art. At the start of a project, grand ideas of what it will look like motivate and thrill. At some point, the piece takes over. It feels like failure. It sucks. The artist needs to step back and let the piece tell the maker what to make and that can take a while. Its like having a conversation with a dream. I am there.
I am still committed to the idea. I will figure this out.
