RHED FAWELL ARTIST RESEARCH

October 24, 2017

RHED FAWELL ARTIST RESEARCH

'Gravitational pull'

Rhed Fawell is a modern artist who is based in London, She uses collage and mixed media focuses her work mainly on the deconstruction of images and adds a poetical aspect to the concept of her work, By doing this it allows her work to create a story which are brought to life by the cut outs from magazines and photographs. Some of the main mediums used include Drawing, Printmaking, collage and paint, Rhed is an artist who enjoys the used of layering and texture which is what I am experimenting with practically, so this artist is one I am very fond of. Rhed likes to take away the concept of her themes by telling a story as she adds more and more materials onto the piece, although a story is added to her work, the genre of art changes from realism to surrealism and conceptual art. Similar to the theme that I am exploring at the moment, Rhed is an artist who wants their work to appear as 'Dream-like' Imagery, In my opinion she odes this by adding photos of characters or people she knows and layers them onto of a cloud for example, the first layer as a foreground.
The photographs used appear to be old and vintage which gives me the opinion that Rhed wants to emphasis different life stages incorporated in his work, for example, an adolescent who does dancing wants to break free from an issue such as not wanting to dance, but her parents could be forcing her. This simply tells the viewer the difference of the problems that occurred in peoples lives in the past and how they have changed considerably overtime, fro example, my personal issues in are very different to somebody who lived in the 1960's-70s. On the other hand, Rhed may want to compare the difference of how society has changed overtime in a good perspective, she may have done this by creating collages that include characters from photos that look vintage, it shows them having fun and doing something they enjoy, exaggerating the contrast of what peoples hobbies in the past and how they have changed.
A very important aspect of Rheds work is that she uses a lot of distortion and abnormal transformations, this could be making the character from a photograph to look bigger than an object, She does this to idolise the effect of exaggeration and creating the concept of imagination of her thoughts being unusual, I could relate this to my own research into dreams that we all have where things happen in the unconscious that would never happen in real life
The artist sometimes includes personal aspects of their own life within their work to explain how they are feeling, however, Rhed does not intend to force the viewer to completely understand the piece relating to the artists issues as she wants them to interpret the image in their own way. Whilst most of the pieces used have a white cartridge paper background some are coloured to create the vintage effect. Some of the backgrounds have texture to them and some of the materials used look like wallpaper, this is an important aspect to the compositions created because it shapes the way that the cut outs added will appear when stuck on top of the background, creating a 3D illusion to viewer.
Many pieces created included line and form as part of a surrealist aspect because it creates a collage of movement, for example, the picture above shows a woman hanging onto the duplicated lines which appear to be in a -90 degree angle. To me, it gives the impression that Rhed wants the viewer to create a scenario of what may be happening in the composition, which is that the woman wants to be freed from loneliness and emptiness by cutting ties with the string or rope that she is connected with. The drawing at the bottom of the composition appear to be another prime example of Rhed including drawing and shape within her piece , in my perspective, the 'rainbow like' semi circles look like they are a cushion for the character to fall onto, exaggerating the feeling of comfort by duplicating the number of semi circles on the collage. In another view, the semi circles could be a symbol of hills and the highest points of them as we are only shown the top half of them, This could present thoughts about the artist wanting to portray the thought of the character wanting to jump from a high.