Change in Direction: Further Research and Initial Visual response for Hypatia of Alexandria.

Having felt like I had hit a bit of a wall in generating ideas/responses to Quentin Crisp I decided to swap to another One of my persons of note: Hypatia of Alexandria. This was because I felt like there was more to say about her in terms of life achievements, philosophies/ethos as well as the tragic events that engulfed her.

In the same way that I approached the work to Crisp I think it is important to initial highlight the most important factors of my research. Firstly I think the fact that she is perhaps the only example in history where a woman has been the undisputed leader of the intellectual world, of which Alexandria was at the centre during the time she was alive, is highly remarkable and it is some one tragic that, when researching this there wasn't as much on her as other male philosophers/mathematicians that has come before her.

Therefore I began my visual investigation by producing a series of collages conveying motifs of mathematics, mainly algebra and geometry, as well as astronomy all of which she was highly knowledgeable of even by today's standards.

Initially I thought perhaps they might be a little to ham fisted in the deliverance of the themes/ideas, however given that it is a subject I am not expert in it is a decent starting point that with some refinement could lead to something both interesting and highly immediate/readable in terms of the inferred meaning. 

The other important part of her life I wished to portray was her death. This is because, as stated in my previous post, it has become symbolic of the end of the period of classic antiquity, an age strongly associated with logic and reason, and the start of the early Christian period which arguably threw the region into something of a dark age.

Therefore I began trying to experiment with images that inferred the destruction of a civilisation and its knowledge as well as ones subtly inferring her actual death.

For example in the above image I created various portraits of her then cut them in to various fragments which I combined with basic geometric forms, squared paper and other bits of paraphernalia pertaining to her status as a learned woman. Given that I'm not one for gore I felt this was a much more subtle and tasteful way of simply hinting upon this given the gruesome nature of her actual death hat involved stoning and flaying at the hands of an angry mob. 

I also began experimenting with other simple motifs such as columns and architecture that would help convey the period classical antiquity, particularly the areas of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt which are associated with it.

I was keen to try much more experimental methods of image making due to the restrictions I felt I had faced within my sketchbook during the last brief. Furthermore I was particularity drawn to the potential of experimental collage due to my love of shape based imagery as well as what I thought would be an opportunity to expand upon previous visual ideas I had touched on in both Visual Language and Narratives. This is once again an example of how this module is slowly alowing us to direct our practices into something much more individual and driven than perhaps they were at the start of the year