Benjamin Davis Link Being Human

I was focusing on recognising and exploring agency and value in the material or non-human, I aimed to use my artifact object, the Vapo-cresolene Spirit Lamp, in order to explore the progression of the man-made world in terms of built environment. I was looking into Salvador Dali as my inspiration because I am interested in surrealism as an art movement and I wanted to follow this in my project. I developed my work through different mediums from pencil, to paint, to cut-out collages in order to effectively portray my theme, I also looked into a brain therapy called the ‘rorschach test’ which was based on false claims much like my archive object.

A big part of my project was combining the imagery of the lamp and the built environment to create a surrealist approach and I enjoyed looking to the lamp to discover interesting ways to discover the connection, for example the mid- section and the roman colosseum, so I made a drawing about that. I made a 3D model of the object to understand it more and was a fun exercise to make the model out of everyday items like the mask, tin foil and a plastic container.

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