Claire Walmsley
'The Psychedelic Community'
For my Negotiated Major Project I chose to focus on 'The Psychedelic Community.' This community is one where people come together over a love of fashion, way of life, art but mainly music. I wanted to show the connection between psychedelic music and how it influences what the subjects wear. I decided to focus on this community mainly because I am a part of it and I still find the eclectic mix of people very interesting to be around. It also gave me ease of access to ask people who I knew if they would help take part. My initial idea was to combine the portrait of a (specific sub-genre of) psychedelia listener, e.g. psychedelic drone music and combine it with an image that they thought represented the sub-genre. My initial portraits for this idea worked quite well and I was very pleased with them and I was quite surprised that it took a completely different turn to what I expected.
I was attending a psychedelia event one weekend at Antwerp Mansion and took my camera along with me to take some photographs. Psychedelia events are held all over the UK and are also growing more popular in Europe and such events draw people of age from about 18 and upwards and they come from all over the world so I knew that it would be the perfect place to get some shots.
I found it very easy to work here as everyone was interested in what I was doing. Unfortunately, I wasn't there long enough before it got dark but I still managed to capture quite a few strong images.
The decision to bleach came about as I was unhappy with the background of my images. I had initially tried to cut the subjects out and combine them with a suitable sub-genre image but I was disappointed with the outcome.
Antwerp Mansion is a dilapidated mansion that has been taken over and it now hosts club nights and art events, but the current owners have decided to leave the courtyard in complete disarray, with pallets and general junk lying around. Interesting to look at - but not what I wanted to be in my photographs. I realised that I needed to find an interesting way to erase it and stumbled across bleaching. I gave it a test run with some old prints and I was impressed at how well it had worked.
The bleaching process was quite time consuming in the beginning as I felt the need to be very careful with it and I had not yet developed a technique that worked well. I had initially used tissue to swipe across the print but this didn't work very well and I was often left with really bleached out pieces and also the tissue would disintegrate onto it too.
When working on my prints I realised that the effect worked extremely well in enforcing the fact that people liked psychedelia as the colours were bright and seemed to bleed into one another.
I then started to look more in depth at the subjects behaviour, the formation of communities and self presentation, leading me to read books by Erving Goffman, Michael Argyle and even to looking at Terence McKenna's Time Wave Novelty Theory.
Through looking at these books I was able to understand the theory that the psychedelic community are the product of memes and that they are in fact imitating others. It was obvious to me that being influenced by the hippie counterculture and the 60s was a bit part of the community, but I had not realised quite how much with regards to the behavioural aspect of it.
I had noticed that a few of my bleached photographs looked a bit dull in parts and the bleach had made a murky brown colour on the print. As I was researching the artist Tobias Tovera I ended coming across something called 'yupo' paper. Yupo is a water resistant paper which when painted onto lets the colours merge together, much like what had happened on my bleached prints. It is relatively unknown and no shops sell it so I had to order some from an art suppliers. When I had completed my painting, I decided that I would combine it with my scanned in prints to fill the dull parts.
Surprisingly, this worked better than anticipated and I am quite pleased with the overall result of it.
The next experiment I wanted to try was converting all my files to black and white and bleaching them in print. I had not realised that there was a difference in printing methods that kiosks and internet companies use so I spent an entire day trying to find somewhere suitable. I do not feel that it went as well as it could have done as the colours were not as intense as they had been on previous prints that I had bleached.
As it was purely out of interest what would happen, I would not be using these for my final prints in the exhibition. I felt that the combination of black and white with colourful bleaching made the subjects appear as if they were ghosts. If I were to expand on the black and white prints further, I think they would benefit from being combined with yupo paintings.
I would also like to experiment with combining microscopic images and the portraits. Unfortunately, the eye piece for my microscope did not come in time. I think that this would have been quite interesting to include within my work and I intend to do this at some point.
I hope to continue this project further after the exhibition and end up with a large series of bleached portraits. I am already planning to go to two psychedelia festivals within 4 months of each other, one of which is a two day event, at which I can expect there to be in excess of 4000 people to choose from for my series.
