"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time"

Hello, these are pictures of paper with words on them from the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. I went there the other day and thoroughly enjoyed it, I bought a badge with a painting of a cat on and a ring with a painting of a lady in. Getting all cultural. No, seriously, I have a real thing for art galleries and museums (just to complete the package I'll say now that I also love word searches and quizzes) Anyway, I was never into fancy, biblical, renaissance art until we went to the Edinburgh gallery on the art trip and I spent four hours staring in amazement at all these massive, perfect, breath taking paintings that were so full of stuff going on but every bit of it was immaculate, even the shadows and the leaves, it was incredible. And now I'm a fan.

In reference to the first lot of photos though, I really like interactional art where people can get involved and write things down cause you know that that's honest and real, plus some of them are just funny. These are some renaissance artists I discovered called Arthur Hughes and John William Waterhouse and took a shine to...

Greed for wealth

So I've been dressing up my mannequin as the seven deadly sins for part of my new art project. I bought her from Camden Market the day after I saw Pulp so could only name her one thing: Candida (because she's Pulp's keyboardist) It was really fun and these lot demonstrate a greed for wealth and jewels, also known as avarice or a sin of excess. This could include disloyalty, deliberate betrayal, treason or theft, usually for personal gain such as hoarding goods and materials.

Sloth

   

  

These are my favourite photos of the lot, they actually make my bed look even comfier and it was easy to all set up and everything. She looks like she's day dreaming, it's quite creepy really. Although the face looks unhappy in all the photos, which is really good in helping demonstrate that committing sinful acts cannot make you happy or fulfilled, her expression almost seems to change with every set of outfits and in this one the eyes seem more sleepy. No wonder, it was a big few days and she'd been through a lot, I photographed her in a building site in the rain a few weeks before and now I plan to collage her, blimey!

     

Gluttony

 

Poor thing ended up in the kitchen sink with no legs, surrounded by rum and dairy lee dunkers.

Anyway, I see gluttony as the excessive intake of food and drink products: fast food, meat, coke a cola, alcohol, maybe even drugs. Consuming more than necessary and becoming addicted to the temptations of our modern world: consumerism, advertisement, want, 

Wrath

  

Wrath, anger, violence, offence, tension, rage, threat, harm, aggression, fury,

"We can only apply pressure against our anger for a certain amount of time until it explodes"

I did initially incorporate devil horns and a pitchfork but thought she looked a bit silly so let the focus turn to body language by just putting her hands up instead, which I think looks better. The first picture at the top is probably my favourite from the whole bunch cause although it's pretty simple I think it might be one of the most effective because of that.

Envy

Envy is a feeling of jealousy towards someone who may achieve or possess superiority, it is said to be "a universal and most unfortunate aspect of human nature because not only is the envious person rendered unhappy by envy, but also wishes to inflict misfortune on others" It was a bit more difficult to capture envy because all I could really do was throw a green shirt over Candida's head and put eye shadow on her face, green does bring out her eyes though.

Vanity

   

This time she was in my old bridesmaid dress looking like a beauty pageant queen. Cause she's only a child mannequin it reminded me of the Little Miss Sunshine competition from the film of the same name, I love that, Olive's performance makes me laugh every time. Anyway this was for Vanity which I discovered is said to be the devil's favourite sin and those who suffer believe themselves to be greater than God, neglecting his power for the affection of their own image.

Lust

    

   

I just need to point out that I'm not trying to suggest anything by using a child mannequin in these photos, this is simply the only mannequin I own and particularly in these lust photos I am NOT promoting or condoning any form of activities I am merely acting out a deadly SIN and used the same mannequin as photographed in the other sins to complete a continuous theme. Even if I was to hint at any sort of message it would be one that related to Anna Richardson's campaign of Stop Pimping Our Kids as a way to symbolize that dressing young children in adult-like clothes is obviously concerning. Also, the representation of me in these photos is not at all correct of how I actually am, I was simply in character and in costume for artistic purposes. Rant over.

Molly's Lips

My favourite Nirvana song from my favourite Nirvana album.

It's a Vaselines cover but I love what they've done with it and it compliments the entire sound of the album. John Peel's son Tom started his 6Music show with it this afternoon and then everything was good. He's sitting in for Huey Morgan at the minute and although I'm finding things a little difficult without him, I've decided I really like Tom cause he's talking about hair. Plus I've taken a big shine to the bird man that comes on and talks about owls, he makes me so happy.