LE'GO

The Halo:

The decision to make a halo versus a veil was made once I had seen an instagram story

This seemed way more achievable than fashioning something out of neons or some kind of lights. God bless Dylan from the FE workshop for letting me borrow a hot glue gun to put this together before the shoot.

The Shoot:

During the shoot I had very specific lighting in mind and wanted the model to be sat facing away from the light source but turn their head back and look directly into the light in order to get the glint. I also used some paper under the halo to reduce the risk of the candles dripping onto the model. Having booked and rebooked the studio/DSLR/trigger/light metre multiple times I was very pleased at the eventual results of the shoot.

The Edit:

After the shoot I used Lightroom to organise the bad from good.  After colour coding I selected the best of the selection and was left with 7 images. The first two were a 'happy accident' and whilst they would work well as stand alone prints, imagery on blotter sheets tends to be very cropped so that as many of the tabs as possible contain some image. If I were to crop these photos in the 'traditional' fashion they would lose a lot of the interesting parts. From there 5 remained. Selecting the final 2 from this was fairly easy as once they were all lined up, it was clear which ones looked the most sorrowful. I edited these once but the headband looked messy so needed to redo. At this point I managed to misplace all of the files and their backups but eventually was reunited with them and edited the final versions. I used the blending layer styles tab to custom edit the colours of one layer to only show a red colour space which resulted in the anaglyph.

The Mask:

3D glasses obtained, and a few variations of the halo made; I put the pieces together with the tights using various means - clear nail paint, thread, blue tack, gum, with the head band, without the head band - I tried the whole lot until something started to kind of work. I was however still concerned about how difficult it was to put on and it was very prone to breaking. Because of realising these factors in the time frame, I decided to leave the mask all together and viewers would just need the glasses. I am annoyed that I was unable to find a solution in time as I was keen for the viewers to become part of the installation but this is something I can develop next year.

Potential Installation Locations/Exhibitions:
"Modern Panic X" Call for Artist submissions
Catholic Churches