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Untitled (Stella) from The Library of Human Hard Copy
Gardiner, Jeremy - Enlarge image
Untitled (Stella) from The Library of Human Hard Copy
- Object:
Photograph
- Place of origin:
United States (made)
- Date:
1984 (made)
- Artist/Maker:
Gardiner, Jeremy (artist)
- Materials and Techniques:
C-type photograph
- Credit Line:
Given by Jeremy Gardiner
- Museum number:
E.519-2010
- Gallery location:
Prints & Drawings Study Room, level C, case MB2E, shelf DR50
Jeremy Gardiner studied at Newcastle University, then the Royal College of Art from 1980 to 1983. He also undertook a computer graphics course at Middlesex Polytechnic, sponsored by General Electric. Whilst at the RCA, Gardiner used a computer to create vector graphics and plotter drawings that formed the basis for larger paintings and graphite drawings. His RCA degree show was a great success, and one of the paintings was bought for the Government Art Collection.
This is one of a set of four images of Stella Orsini, created in 1984 while Gardiner was a Harkness Fellow in the Visible Language Workshop (VLW) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The VLW had been co-founded by Muriel Cooper and Ron MacNeil a decade earlier, in 1975. When Gardiner arrived, it was in the process of becoming part of MIT’s newly-established Media Lab, launched by Nicholas Negroponte.
Gardiner used the Visible Language Workshop’s SYS graphics computer system to create the four images: “Whilst I was at MIT, Stella Orsini was writing her thesis about how artists were using computers creatively. She was based in the VLW and I made a series of portraits of her, combining images of her face with pictures from Gray’s Anatomy. I created a four-panel portrait, which depicts her face frozen by a flash and then peeled away slowly to reveal the musculature beneath.”