What is Beauty?

This was my first final year A-Level project and the topic was left entirely up to us; our starting point for initial ideas was simply our interests and what we were curious about. I have always been interested in what makes someone beautiful, as it is an entirely subjective judgement. We cannot possibly define beauty, yet there are some faces that are universally beautiful. I researched into the history of beauty and the beauty of other cultures, but modern beauty is what fascinated me most as it varies so often. After experimentation and research I eventually went down the path of plastic surgery and how today, people actually get to the point where they physically mess with their face and body in a way that make up and photo touch ups never do.

The images below are taken from my digital sketchbook as the majority of work for this project has been carried out digitally. There are a couple of experimentations and development of my final piece, which I am still in the process of making!

And here is my final!

To present this piece, my teacher made a light box 150cm x 150cm and I printed the piece on acetate to give it an x-ray feel. The piece was cut into several smaller squares and stuck on using crosses of invisible tape.

Philosophy in Visual Form

So these were my finals for my last A-Level project. It was basically left up to us and I chose to try to visually represent a couple of theories I'd studied in my Philosophy class. The first is Berkeley's Subjective Idealism and the second is Descartes' Dualism. I did them both as a poster celebrating the years since the arrival of their theory. I don't have the version of the Berkeley piece with his name, theory and date unfortunately, but you get the idea from the image!