Live through this- the artful art of the role of the art in the ugly art of survival (11)

Cleverly done this looks at comic book illistartator Diane DiMassa but actually in a comic strip. the comic its self is all over the place and suggests that her life is the same. it shows us her in theropy and how it startered her drawing. it also shows us that she tried to kill herself, and had a drug problem, and was also bi-polar. she had a vast mix of problems. her work is very expressive but its a shame that she doesnt go into more detail. its almost as if shes dodging the facts by trying to be comical.

Live through this- Rappin' my wounds (10)

Here we read about toni blackman a hip-hop artist. The story is touching. its about her relationship with a man who is both psycically and mentally abusing her. he messes with her mind, making love with her and then saying he doesnt want her, he punches her, and yet she lets him because she is deeply in love with him and he 'touches her soul.' its a sadly common story. its almost a form of self punishment,she is twisted into believing tht this is her fault. this is what she deserves. we read that everytime she confronts him nothing changes and till she realises that she deserves better and that she is just punishing herself. 

Thoughts so far

Reading this book is very much inspiring my work. Some more then others, but still all something i can take from. I have had a few ideas from some of the peices written in the book. its important for me to draw from as many places that i can for inspiration on the experiences people have with self destruction. for now i will continue to read these entrys. its also inspiring me to look into other texts, maybe looking back at the idea of using diary entrys. Or maybe just a text of people looking back at experiences they have had like the book itself. after all from the past we learn.

Live through this- Friends as heroes (9)

Silas Howard was a tormented child, from a mixed up family, she was sexually active at a very young age and turned to booze also at a young age which later lead to her turning to cocain and heavy drugs use. It is also about the friendship she shared with two girls she met on her travels and turned into a long lasting friendship. We hear how it wasnt till Silas went to a AA meeting and became clean from substance abuse, that she and her friends begun to create, writing music and later to write and direct a film.

live through this- double trouble in the love art lab: our breast cancer experiments (8)

Here we look at the unusal Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle. it follows there journey falling inlove, and deciding to create a 7 year art project called the love art lab in which they wanted to exhibit love to rid the world of some of its hatred. When the story takes a devistating turn of events when annie found a lump. she was confirmed to have breast cancer a year into the project. and to stay positive they decided to take the cancer as a project in there art lab. the first peice created was a two-woman performace piece called 'exposed: experiments in love, sex and death' in which they look back on there experiences in starting a new relationship as well as looking into the feelings that they felt over the experiences with cancer.They also did a 'chemo fashion show' in which they took photos of themselves in different clothes often comically during annies chemo sessions which lasted 4 months. The most unusal of there work, hair erotica came about when they desided to cut there hair as annies had started to fall out and got there photographer friend to photograph it. it was very erotic and they wanted to show that death can be erotic, it almost looks as if it is part of a fetish.  as a whole they some how manage to show the love between us and almost make annies cancer into art.

live through this- she's lost control again (and how alice learnt to drive) (7)

The piece beguins by talking about a work that writer nicole blackman wrote about a girl with an eating disorder, a  character study almost. She did not herself suffer with it, but soon women were no longer feeling connected to the peice in a good light, but negatively looking it as a goal to look for, to achieve controlled self-destruction. She was over whelmed by the responce she got from readers, she had hundreds of girls and boys contacting them, most of them on the brink, self harmers, eating disorders, alchol abuse.  And tried as best she could to help these people, answering every cry for help she recieved and how much she had learnt about these people and methods of coping and the links between self destruction. She also talks about a girl who wrote to her called 'alice' who seeked for help and how she talked her through the experience of letting these feelings drive her, and instead driving herself into what she wants to achieve in a positive mannor.

live through this- Slash n burn (6)

to start this piece beguins with a rather good peice of text which is really fitting with what i am looking into:
'I hurt myself today
To see if i still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real' Trent Reznor via Johny Cash
This section is about Inga M.Muscio An author. she talks about the impact that death had on her life, and not being able to say goodbye, first she talks about the death of her brother, and then moves onto the death of her father which resulted on her mum setting up a new family with her newly outted gf. how this had pushed her and her brother apart, and how she had regretted not getting close to him before his tragic death and how this sent her in a downward spiral in not eating and sleeping, not to die but because she felt nothing more then loss. How she soon turned to cutting after an accident with a broken glass started a fastination with cutting into the numbness and watching the different stages of healing. she talks about burning herself and the lengths she went through to hide this from people, and how now after stopping the scars are a reminder of the healing process she had to go through.

Live throught this- total disaster: sketching sanity (5)

Artist Fly uses her art to express her inner most feelings, this started when she suffered a nervous breakdown to which she turned to her sketchbooks. She describes how she felt during her breakdown, as almost an out of body experience to which her body and her mind were disconnected. and her drawings would be a away of bringing back together herself. She talks about her self portraits she did during this time, and how it helped her, but now she cant even bear to look at some of them. She also talks about the difficulty she had to look at herself in the mirror, it was a frightening concept. Her work almost copies the idea that she has different emotions alot of the times and that she could switch easily between depression and euphoria because her work is so diverse, looking at the work collectively it doesnt look like it could be from the same artist which is really unusual.

Live through this- a little hell breaks loose (4)

poet and spoken word preformer Patricia Smith talks about her relationship with her parents, how her mother wanted her to act as something she wasn't, how she clung to the father she loved even though he was hardly the catholic role model her mother wanted, and how her fathers murder affected her. she talks about how her father encoraged her writing, and how she used his death to fuel her her passion for writing.

live through this- fighting fire with acid rain: a story of coming down (3)

This piece is by illistrator Cristy c.Road whom uses her unique, almost comic book style to tell her story.Her story tells of a cocaine abuse, an addiction the the thrill, and not wanting to feel the emoitions seeping back in she would snort more when she feel she was on a come down, it affected her views on life an relationships, meaningless sex with strangers gave her a connection that she needed to feel, and how she one day realised that she didn't want to die with that numbness given to her by her addiction and how she wanted to focus on her work. While the text is highly descriptive of her come down and the emoitions seeping back in, it was the imagery which hit me more. The drawing she used to accompany the description of her turn around was herself, pulling out her heart from her chest and sewing it back together, which really symbolised and helped to visually show all the emotions she stated she went through, and this is something that i want to focus on, expeshilly in my video work, this short piece based around self harm but using visual symbolism rather than obvious gore.