East End Gallery Hunt

     On Saturday, January 14th we all met at the Borough Market for breakfast before the East End Gallery Hunt.  We ate these amazing cheese sandwiches with onions and garlic from one of the huge number of food stands.  I also bought a cup of fresh orange-pineapple juice and a chocolate croissant.  Everything there looked and smelled so good!  It was hard not to buy everything I saw that seemed amazing.  After we ate, we went on the East End Gallery Hunt where we walked around trying to locate all the small galleries that were listed on the map.  It was disappointing to find so many that were closed, and even some that I did see were not very impressive.  I was not drawn to the pieces in The Approach by Gary Webb, which I honestly just found boring, or the video From Here to Eternity by Oliver Pietsch, which I thought was a little gruesome.  I also thought some of the other galleries were just weird, such as White Cube.  This gallery consisted of two rooms of Rachel Kneebone's porcelain sculptures of twisted and disturbing body parts, mostly human genitalia.  Her work was apparently supposed to relate to grief and death in Lamentation (2010), but all I saw was unnecessary amounts of penis wars.  I was actually really drawn to her pencil drawings, as I have noticed the thread of what I like throughout this trip. I liked how they were drawn, as sketches almost where the process of erasing was very obvious and that is appealing to me.  But again I did not like the subject of her work at all.
     I did not dislike eveything I saw that Saturday.  I loved the Francesca Woodman show.  Another thing I have noticed about myself on this trip is that I have been really inspired by a lot of photography.  I think I should consider taking more photography courses to experiment with what I have seen and loved while here in London.  I felt a lot of Woodman's pieces were engaging and I was able to pick up on her techniques from the Basic Photography course I have just taken.  I loved her images of herself as a blur where she clearly used a low shutter speed to capture the movement in an almost ghostly fashion.  She uses a lot of motion along with mirrors and glass in her pieces; I find the reflections are just as interesting as the subject itself and shot together in one photograph makes it great.  There was this one where she was kneeling on top of a mirror and her upper body is a blur of motion but the image on the mirror is mostly still, creating a stunning disillusionment.  I liked the way she used her own body as a subject in most of the pieces, and I felt that while rachel Kneebone mutilated the human forms Woodman used the human form in a beautiful way.  I also liked the photo of her human form just crouching in a glass box and she appears to be a silhouette because of the lighting.  Her photos were she seemed to be just a black silhouette in motion reminded me of Floris Neususs's photograms in the V&A.  She also uses all natural lighting in her work which I think is amazing and hard to always work with.  I definitely want to find a way to incorporate some of these forms and concepts into my own work somehow because I really have been inspired by a lot I have seen on this trip.