Moving Photographs and Text by Juliette Stuart
BA (Hons) Illustration and Visual Media – Year 3
Being stuck in quarantine, many of us are now focusing on food and eating more than ever – be it in planning elaborate meals now that we have time to cook, or constant snacking out of sheer boredom. Inspired by Dutch still life paintings, particularly the ‘ontbijt’ (breakfast) paintings, I wanted to create a modern, colourful, quarantine edition of ‘still lifes’ of the food that I’ve been eating a lot of, with a surreal twist. I inverted some of the vanitas imagery and made a series that looks a lot brighter and happier, but I wanted to add in the multiple hands with their constant fidgeting to maintain some level of unease in the otherwise very neatly structured scenes. I only have myself to film, so using a borrowed camera from my flatmate I had to film my hand coming in from multiple angles and stitch the footage together to create the scenes with more than one hand in. A lot of the backgrounds are made of my coats, a large shirt, and an IKEA blanket because I could only use what I had lying around. The cardboard cut outs are made from some old mount board I had lying around, and all the glasses and plates were charity shop purchases I made for a pervious project that I shot before lockdown. I’m happy with the result – using just what I had available to me I think I was able to create something that looks professional and surreal that I am proud of.
reference … dutch still life paintings ontbijt