Still life has long been my ‘go to’ genre. The symbolism of still life sits well with my explorations of impermanence and mortality. I am interested in our relationships to objects and the interplay between material and digital.
I also feel a debt of gratitude to all those women who were pioneers in the field (Clara Peeters, Rachel Ruysch etc.) and battled with the academy. I try to imagine what it must have been like to live in an era where you had to have permission to sign your own works because you were female.
It was probably inevitable given my current experiments with AI generated work that still lives would be next. I created a training set from images tagged still life and still life with bottle, the GAN did the rest. Interesting to see how different these are to the trees in the previous project, I think this has shown me about the impact of more variety in the training set. Nonetheless I am still really happy with the results. I can also see some of these as paintings.
I can imagine some of them printed large on a gallery wall. From a distance they might appear as if a traditional still life, then as you approach the oddness will emerge. My experiments are not about getting the training to the point that the computer can exactly replicate the originals, I prefer these (re)interpretations. They work well with my digital remains fantasy of the computers playing with my work when I am gone.
