Amanda Baron: Thesis- End of First Term

For my thesis I have been developing a body of work under the idea of the alien. In doing so, I have moved away from its extraterrestrial connontations and adopted it as my own noun to describe the foreign nature of the self. Drawing inspiration directly from existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, issues of the human unknown and alienation emerge; alienation originating within the self and the other, as well as the idea of the gaze and shame, our loss of identity and nature, but also our freedom within our nature. I believe we experience the struggle of our condition every day in our growing world. This lead me to my experimentation with digital painting, where I expose and submit to the pressures of technology and modernity. Within the separation of the hand and the work I quite literarally become estranged and subjective to my art, which makes it un-precious, ever changing and free of purpose. I have illustrated its evolving nature by painting over some of my digital works with oil paint, some change little where as others have been demolished. After working with oil I retreated back to the brush and palette and made a series of simple, emotive paintings, to, as a way “retreat back to my home planet” and re-adapt from the foreign digital reality.

My processes are very important to my work because it illustrates the anxious nature of art and of being human. How as intelligent and adaptive creatures we have no nature and lack purpose in the world thus we must constantly be creating our own purpose. In doing so, we can become monstrous, estranged, detached or completely succumbed by the imposition of “the other”. Thus, to reconcile living as an individual one must first adapt to living as an outsider or, Alien and embrace its many forms within the human condition and be free of its restraints.