Student profiles: Zoe Wetherall

Canterbury Girls’ Secondary College
VCE Studio Arts

I firstly wanted to compare the body language of my friends to body language of strangers. I photographed my friends and strangers on the city streets, and my aim was to produce the artwork in Adobe Photoshop. I wanted to work around the theme of body language using digital imaging and photography to carry out my aims.

 

After choosing the theme of ‘body language’, I observed the body language of both my friends and strangers. I went into the city and observed people on the street to see how they use body language to communicate with people and portray messages without even knowing it. I started simply observing people in the world around me.

 

I chose to use photography on my computer and my photos in Adobe Photoshop 6.0. I really like the Effects I can get in Photoshop, but I especially like how I can erase any mistakes I make, or if I don’t like something I can get rid of it. Working in layers really helped me and gives me a broader range of things I can do to an image. Digital photography and digital imaging is still fairly new technology and it is becoming more popular all the time. The future is heading towards digital and that’s how I created my work. Without new technology such as digital imaging and programs like Photoshop, I would not have been able to create artwork like I have this year in Studio Arts.

 

To establish the theme of my work, I firstly considered all my interests. I still wasn’t sure of what area to focus on, and I ended up looking through a list of possible themes that students worked around in previous years. The theme of ‘body language’ instantly caught my eye and I became interested. I thought it would be fascinating to observe people’s body language and how they communicate without speaking.

 

The most difficult thing in producing my work was trying to get all the images in my series to match. I have one series of 6, two series of 3 and one artwork on its own, and it was a challenge to make the images look like a series. They needed to relate in some way (whether they related in colour and/or subject matter) and complement each other, which I sometimes found difficult.

 

The main influence was the people around me like my friends or just strangers on the street. Just observing how people react in certain situations and studying various people’s body language was enough to influence my work. By observing people I came to the conclusion to compare body language of familiar people, like friends, to that of strangers. I based a lot of my work on that comparison.