Edward Lear

'Remove the pan into the next room, and place it on the floor. Bring it back
again, and let it simmer for three quarters of an hour. Shake the pan violently untill all
the Amblongusses have become of a pale purple colour.
Then, having prepaired the paste, insert the whole carefully, adding at the same time
a small pidgeon, 2 slices of beef, 4 cauliflowers and any number of oysters.
Watch patiently till the crust begins to rise, and add a pinch of salt from time to time.
Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.'
-An extract from Edwards Lears 'Nonsense Cookery: To Make an Amblongus Pie'

I've said before about how I often start with Lear in my attempts to make funny art, but how for some reason it never really works. I've struggled quite a lot with this simply because a lot of Lears texts have depressing themes within them. 'The Courtship of the Yonghy Bonghy-Bo' is full of lost love, rejection, regret and loneliness. So naturally when I focused on his poems to create a series of old-fashioned looking photographs (following the style of Julia Margaret Cameron) they all ended up looking quite sad and depressing. The first image is based on 'The Quangle Wangle Quee' and has quite a lonely, isolated feel to it (by the way the 'man' in the picture is me!) although at the same time has an element of absurdity to it, with the massive hat the character is wearing. However in the second image which was based on the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo poem I've shown Lady Jingly looking extremely sad with her hens, I suppose the hens add absurdity like the massive hat, but not in such an obvious way..

The other images are from the project I am currently working on. The image of the pidgeon with the vegetables relates to the quote above and the next photo is a similar experiment for 'The Jumblies'. I've taken the objects within the texts and put them together without their context. The idea was that people would see these traditional 'still life' style images and question why on earth I decided to put a pidgeon and some oysters in the same painting. I liked the idea of randomness and wanted to puzzle my audience. However I moved on to looking at each object on its own but in a style which links them all together and the last image below shows some of the images I put together based on 'The Owl and the Pussycat'. I feel like with this project its become more about the objects themselves then the idea of my work being funny or surreal.

Maybe one day I will make exactly what I want and produce a body of work that adheres to my aims...... although I'm sure if I did I would get bored very quickly! 

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