Hello London

I manage to have found reasons to go to London 3 times in the past 12 months... It started with a trip to get my Visa last year where I went with friends and did a lot of drawing in the free galleries the rest of the time we were there. My last trip was to get a tattoo from my cousin, and this one was to go to a poster conference at the V&A.

I went with my friend Jess, getting a 6 hour night bus from Plymouth. It is a fairly uncomfortable experience, getting in at 7.15 am all bleary eyed and achy from sleeping sideways on bus seats... Being a student though, needs must and it means I can justify staying longer :).

We walked past Buckingham palace and through St.James park to go to the London college of Optometry which has an Optometry museum. I am currently working on a brief to design the walls of the Optometry centre at Plymouth uni and this was basically research for that (and the excuse to try on lots of funky glasses)

We then went to the National Portrait gallery and the Tate to do some drawing before visiting an old friend of mine at his bar next to the Thames and managing to get fairly tipsy in the middle of the afternoon! This resulted in some very confused walking to the hostel and me getting angry all the roads near Elephant and Castle tube station looking the same...

The next day we got up bright and early to go to a conference about posters at the V&A. The day consisted of a wide range of speakers from those analysing how posters are viewed, people who hold different collections, and artists using the idea of the poster in different ways.

I most enjoyed the talks from artists, David Mccandles from www.Informationisbeautiful.net who creates infographics to help us process large amounts of information more easily, watch his video "debtris" here.

Also work from "the space highjackers" which is pretty self explanatory and very interesting, click here to watch!

We finished up that day with Yo Sushi in Harvey nicks. I don't like fish but just end up getting all of the deep fried things which are amazing :)

The last day we left the hostel and headed straight for the science museum to play around with fun things like heat sensitivity cameras and liquid nitrogen.

Before heading across to the V&A to draw some more exciting things. I like to sit and draw patterns from all the amazing ceramics and textiles :)

We stumbled upon the performance section which I had never seen before, so many crazy costumes!

I then had a rather lovely 6 hour bus back last night-back to reality and uni work! Ah well...

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Why do we perceive things to be disturbing?

Ok so this is fairly random, but I have been doing some research as part of one of my projects and I found the results pretty interesting so thought I would share them :)

I am looking into how we perceive things to be disturbing or creepy, and how illustration can make things appear less shocking, and make subjects like death and violence easier to look at. 

I asked a group of people on my course to look at 5 images and rank them in the order of which made them the most uncomfortable, I then asked them to comment on why they found each image the most or least uncomfortable to look at! 

Here are the pictures in the order of least to most hard to look at, and some people comments. Feel free to comment and let me know what order you would have put them in, and why :)

(Illustration by Joanne Oldham)

“The character being stabbed doesn't look like they're in pain.. and it's a puppet, and a cartoon..”

“far away from reality. The colours are less intimidating/scary and the figures have no obvious expressions so it’s easier to distance yourself from what’s happening"

“the characters are too naively drawn, colours are whimsical (all 3 prime colours are used too, a device often used in childrens toys to make them more appealing) the witch is not looking at her victim, which detracts from the hostility the picture would otherwise have”

(from the gashlycrumb tines by Edward Gorey)

“more subversive almost Burton-esque horror”

“This one is really sinister when you think about it, but doesn't feel that disturbing to look at as an image”

“weird but its cartoon like so not as harsh as the more realistic ones.”

“is easy to look at because of the black and white and the snow. it reminds me of calvin and hobbes which i like to read.”

(from tumblr, if you know the artist please comment)

“not as realistic and sort of cute in a twisted way, but it’s a dead kid and that’s not nice, the colours are pretty morbid”

“The way the body is hanging and the sickly colours - It's looks like an old Victorian photograph, which is creepy..”

“cos its a child and it stands out from the others due to yellow colour”

(also tumblr, comment if you know the artist)

“It's the eyes...! She's looking right at you...! And I think the contrast in colours makes it the most intense and disturbing image”

“crazy eyes and depth of blood colour”

“because the eyes are staring directly at you”

(also tumblr, comment if you know the artist)

“claustrophobic images and graphic”

“feeling of claustrophobia and torment”

“very disturbing but the lack of colour causes me to mostly view it objectively rather than subjectively”

“realistic so easier to relate to and looks disturbing-not too bad cos’ there’s no blood”

In conclusion, this confirmed some of what I expected. We are more shocked by images that are more human and things that we can relate to. When things are more cartoon-like they seem detached from reality and therefore less shocking, even if the imagery is of dead children. Many found the fourth image most disturbing because the eyes were looking directly at you, the last image won out because of the feeling of claustraphobia and the fact that it was the most realistic.

One thing I hadn't thought about was how colour affected peoples perceptions, the first image uses bright primary colours which makes it more playful and the imagery was very simplistic, the blood made up of cartoon style droplets means it is very detached from reality.

In the other images, the sickly yellow in the image of the child made it more disturbing, and a few commented that the two monochrome images were easier to look at because of the lack of blood and colour. The face covered in blood was close to winning because people found the blood and colours gross and intense to look at.  

So, what do you think of this experiment? Some useful things to work with here if you want to make any artwork of dead people :)