Eilis Giles-Book Link Observing

IMAGE: WESTX INTERVUS (1978) Scenes around West Cross, Wishaw. Enrico Cocozza interviews local people as they go about their daily business and captures moments of various strangers passing through the street his flat overlooks.
IMAGE: Acrylic paint on white paper (7.5cm x 10cm) Observational painting of still from archive video
IMAGE: Acrylic paint on white paper (8cm x 11.5cm) Observational painting of still from archive video
IMAGE: Acrylic paint on white paper (9cm x 15.5cm) Observational painting of still from archive video
IMAGE: Acrylic paint on white paper (7cm x 9.5cm) Observational painting of still from archive video
IMAGE: Acrylic paint on white card (A2)
IMAGE: Acrylic paint on white card (A2)

I was inspired by a video in the archive, it observed people in their lives, going about their routines. These humans living, being alive, in the environments that they have created. I was drawn to the retro feel of the video, the stills in technicolor which lend a sense of vibrancy but also a sense of a bygone era or looking back. I wanted to observe other humans, to try and think about what being human means. We learn most things in life by watching others. That’s why I found this video so interesting, it is just ‘people watching‘. The viewer, as voyeur, is observing other people’s lives, their movements, their footprints, observing them being here on this planet. I was influenced by the posthuman lecture to look at humans as an entire species rather than singular individuals. The lecture discussed the divisions between humans and animals. I think that as a species we are beginning to stray further and further away from the natural world. The more we innovate and technologies advance the greater the separation is from other life forms. I considered environment as a way to distinguish or separate humans from other species. I wanted to represent this feeling of isolation and detachment by creating a tense unnatural atmosphere in my paintings. This is expressed in the urban environment, which is an entirely human construct, an artificial man-made environment. 

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