Essence

For the second theme for The Affinity with Aoife Casey we chose 'Essence'. I was quite excited about this theme and I felt it opened up a lot more options and concepts than the previous. However this turned out to be a bit of a difficult one as I just had too many ideas. At one stage I was exploring the idea of 'essence of the city' and looked into trying to get into Boland Mills in Dublin, as amazing as that would be I realised that's just not who I am as an artist. I like to create my own world in my photography inspired by fashion, fantasy and my bizarre thoughts and dreams.

I've always been inspired by astrophysics and the cosmos and have been watching the tv show 'Cosmos' recently. In it the fantastic host Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about how we are all made of star stuff, and how we are all tiny universes. This was it. This was my concept, I can't believe I hadn't thought about it before now. It was perfect, it would challenge me to think outside my comfort zone yet appeal to my love of science. I began looking to fashion photography first as that's normally my first move for finding inspiration and came across various sci-fi, galactic, space-age and starry images, all with the same use of colour. Colour, hasn't really been my friend, I tend to lean towards black and white and prefer subtle tones than bright colours. But the more I looked the more I realised I just had to do colour. This scared me a little bit but I knew I had to do it.

I decided to shoot inside, also an unfamiliar concept, I much prefer natural light but knew CI just couldn't achieve the galactic feel outdoors. I had my ever trusting model and friend Clara come to my home and basically painted her face with bright purples and an insane amount of glitter. I had found some fairy lights earlier in the day and thought they would create some nice shadows and simulate the stars in the image. 

To be honest we struggled for the first few shots, I was unsure, out of my comfort zone, she was uncomfortable, uncertain of what she was doing as we had never done a portrait before. All my models are usually posing in a natural landscape so I knew this would be a challenge for both of us.

About half way through I decided to switch back to black and white, I knew it was where I could relax and I see light much better that way and feel I can work better with it. And BOOM there it was, the light caught the glitter magnificently, every spec was highlighted and it was creating the shadows I desired. Only problem was it was in black and white...

I decided to play with colours and looked at galactic photography for the colour palette. I added some stars I made with the brush tool on photoshop and came up with this! I called this one 'Body', representing the star essence we are all made up of, every living thing is connected through this make up,every living thing has a body made up of tiny universes.

My second image was inspired by the line "nothing can be created from nothing" from Lucretius' 'On the Nature of Things'. I called this one 'Void', as a contrast to the first image. 

Our next theme will be 'Greed', deadline is end of April. I've already started the research process so hopefully I find inspiration and a willing model soon!