CASE STUDY:
MELINDA GIBSON
Do a case study on Melinda Gibson's works and create a series of 3-5 images using traditional methods (non-digital) based on your study of the experimental intent for a campaign using her style.
ABOUT MELINDA GIBSON
Melinda Gibson is a British photographer and collage artist. Her primary focus is the shifting of boundaries of the photographic medium and how imagery is received and understood within its contextual surroundings.
Her cutouts are rough and angled, making use of either her own personal photos or magazines. She often completely removes human subjects/objects from the photos, replacing them with imagery, creating new perspectives and a unique vision.
CREATIVE BRIEF
O School (CLG, Charity) is a dance studio and performing arts centre, as well as a social enterprise that opened up in 2006 under the purview of MCCY, with Institute of A Public Character (IPC) status effective from 2016. O School provides a wide variety of dance classes to the Singaporean dance community and aims to identify and develop youth dance talents as well as the Singapore dance market, so as to build sustainable careers for these talents.
INSIGHT
Dancers love what they do as it's their form of expression.
MESSAGE
Dancers are storytellers
Dancers are storytellers
CONCEPT
Storytelling
PROCESS
I made use of photos I took for my dance club so I wouldn't have to look through the internet for them. These were the ones I picked out but I didn't manage to use all of them for the final works.
These were film photos I took, I used these because I liked the contrast between the quality of the DSLR camera photos and the film camera photos.
I faced quite a lot of difficulty with the layering of the photos, which is why I ended up not using 2 of these as they were ruined during the process. Instead of pasting to the back of the foreground image, I carefully planned the layers and then pasted from the back to the front. I also tried to experiment with materials I had like tape and sewing thread. It didn't really work out at first as the shape I was following looked weird.
I matched the images to what was being conveyed by the dancers in the performance
FINAL WORKS
Control
Forbidden
Emerging
REFLECTION
From this case study of Melinda Gibson, I learned that cleanliness isn't everything. Collage work is not about creating something that's perfect. It's a form of expression and a way to provide new perspectives into just a simple photo. I believe that the roughness of the pieces add a lot of dimension and rawness. I really enjoyed her use of photos that have stark contrast, lots of vibrant colours and dynamics, making her pieces very interesting.
Her style is definitely a new "tool" I would consider using for future projects, including the campaign for O School. O School is known for breaking boundaries. Dance itself provides new perspectives and is a great way of storytelling. Hence, I would consider applying her style for this campaign.
THANK YOU FOR READING
