Madonna and Child

annamcandrew — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 23:18:03 +0000

One night my brother and I came home to find many paintings my niece had made lying on the kitchen table. 'Hey this looks like the Madonna and Child' said Simon intrigued by the innocent creation of his daughter. I immediately thought of my fine art project in which we had to chose a painting in the national gallery and transcribe it. I wanted to create a work that was less focused on a specific object we can see, such as a canvas or sculpture and use a medium I had not before.

I took my dictaphone and recorded people talking about the painting my niece had made (please see recording and image below) without telling them what it was. This represents the audio guide I used in the national gallery to help me understand the paintings as the huge mass of them did not have much meaning or value until I knew the story behind them. It was interesting to see how varied people's dialogues were. Some giving an honest literal account of what they saw, and others letting their imagination flow. It made me think of many other themes, such as the conditioning society and schooling has on us, the suppression of our creativity and confidence in our own imaginations or even to what extend we can look into a scribble on a piece of paper and come up with so many meanings, which is sort of what a lot of conceptual art provokes us to do.

project brief

Madonna and Child