More Brain Storming...

I had another email from Hilsy today. She tells me that the face of the bird on the left was made from another one of my face-prints, which is scary - do I really look like a dead bird, 'cos that face on the left still looks like a dead bird, albeit one that doesn't quite look like it belongs on that particular dead bird's body... She also tells me that even the paper backbround was photographed in my studio! And no doubt the image of me was taken from a photo of me. So infact every component has some connection to me, and yet it says far more about Hilsy to me than it says about me.

This is interesting because it opens up all those questions about authorship and copyright that we all know about: is what I was trying to say/do with my original drawings remotely encapsulated in Hilsy's image? Does this matter? Does it make it any more interesting that a close friend, rather than a complete stranger, made the image using my images? Does the fact that someone that is close to me made the image mean that it has more authority about me as the originator of the drawings, than if a complete stranger made it? No; I don't think it does, because what I see is Hilsy's view of me. If a complete stranger made the image I would be seeing their idea of me - neither of which have anything to do with the things I was thinking about when I made those original drawings and prints. Which also begs the question, what was Hilsy thinking about when she made her digital image? Was she trying to make some kind of portrait of me; was she trying to understand my images in her own visual language; was she trying to say something about herself? I suppose the rub that will affect anyone that has their images used in this way, is that the new audience may still associate the new image with the original author, but in fact it could have nothing to do with them at all.

I was, in truth, startled when I first saw Hilsy's image: it's my stuff, but it's not me. The prints are from a completely different series of works from the birds (and they now have a kind of graphic quality), and I find it discordant seeing them juxtaposed in this way - they were, are, completely different approaches to a subject that I'm interested in (the nature of self), and in my mind they will stay that way. But isn't that what's interesting about image making: once you put it out there others are at liberty to interpret them anyway they want, make connections between them anyway they want?

For me though, there's another twist here, because the drawings of mine that Hilsy has made her finished digital image from are all from my work-in-progress. I still haven't worked through my thoughts and ideas yet, and someone else has 'stole my thunder' and done it for me. But of course she hasn't, because her image doesn't resolve, for me, any of the things I was trying to address when I made these works. In a way, her image has offered me something more to think about in my investigation of the nature of self: is what she has produced still about self, in particular my self? It's like my self three times removed - once through Hilsy's eye/mind, then through her pc, then presented back to me. Like genes, there's a bit of the originals in there somewhere, but they're so far removed that it now has its own self and you can barely see a flicker of where it actually came from. Or perhaps that should be I can barely see a flicker from where they actually came from. Perhaps Hilsy, and others that know me, still see me in this digital image that she has made. But what I see is distictly Hilsy.