Materials used: Oil paint and plastic on plywood

As I walked into the room, I felt instantly attracted to this piece of art work created by Ku-lim Kim. He spent many of his years in military services and witnessed many young men losing their lives in military hospitals. Kim uses his experiences of death to create this piece, when at this point he felt that ‘human existence was extremely insignificant’, due to the lack of medicine and proper medical care. Kim has filled the surface with charred cracks, which was achieved by burning plastic. It could be said that this reflects the 'insignificance' of human existence and wearing away of the human existence throughout his experiences being in military services.   

It was small in size compared to many of the sculptures and pieces that were positioned in the same room, but I had never seen anything like this before. The markings and textures created on this piece signify this idea of being destroyed. A lot of the work within this room had very dark colour pallete, which I believe demonstrates a sense of anger, death and negative connotations.

 

The use of having only these 12 photographs on the wall catches the eye of anyone walking past and compels them to look deeper at the artwork to see the people as more than just a face on the wall. The identical blank expressions on all 12 people’s faces shows that the photographer is trying to capture the idea that they are being made to all have the same identity and expels the idea of individuality. 

Agnes martin has said that ‘the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but... the paintings are very far from being perfect – completely removed in fact – even as we ourselves are.'

 This piece is by an Indian artist who is known as Mrinalini Mukherjee. This artwork features a dark colour scheme(dark green, red and grey) featuring heavy knitwear (made from Hemp fibre and steel) that looks like clothing. Which appears to be hanging on its own. This piece connects to my project through the error of excess, which is presented by the layering of the materials.

Upon viewing this artwork was amazement at the vividness of the colours, the individual uniqueness of each specific article within the “Library” and the familiarity of prints, deeply significant in both mine and the artist’s ethnic roots, which in this case is African, especially Nigeria. It also further struck my initial reaction due to initially not thinking each piece of the Library was an individual book, but upon noticing and seeing how each print was carefully attached allowed me to further reinterpret how I understood the description of the art and how the artist wanted to convey his message. 

The British Library is an art display portraying 6000+ books, in which 2700 have been detailed with golden leaf printed names of both first and second-generation immigrants who’ve each had a significant impact, contributing to British culture and history. Each book having been covered by Dutch wax print fabric, which in itself has a history of adaptation through different cultures, Europe, Asia and Africa. The journey of the fabric itself having a commonality with the theme of immigration, a journey from one end of the world to another carrying a story, history and a the goal to start a new story in the land they’re heading to. 

I compare this piece to my work and ideas, due to the approach to colour, contrasting patterns from each book and adding context behind a visual display that otherwise at first glance may not be noticed. My concept of deconstruction, manipulating colours and repairing ties in with the use of taking books and reconstructing the cover print, mixing colours and prints, turning a plain, blank collection of books, into a assortment of stories, not to mesh in a colour-coordinated fashion but in a varied assortment that needs no order, that doesn’t conform to a specific standard of being placed, such as the immigrants should not, so should the work also.

What I took from this is how each unique distinct pattern is no similar to the next, as how immigrants are sometimes painted with a broad brush, in this instance it shows how this is not the case, how each story, each person, each print, each immigrant not only by different exterior carries their own beauty, but also a unique story to them only that makes up The British Library(Britain). 
 
Furthermore, the fact that not every book in the library has a name attached, how I took this was that there are still many untold stories of immigrants that came to make this country what it is, but despite them being somewhat unknown, their existence is etched into the Library through the numerous un-named books and in line with the named, shows their efforts and impacts is not any less significant than those who have been mentioned.