'Ophelia'
This portrait 'Ophelia' is inspired by pre Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais’ famous depiction of the drowned Ophelia, Hamlet’s lover from Shakespeare’s tragedy. At the original painting’s debut at the Royal Academy in London in 1852, critics were dismayed. The Times declared that “there must be something strangely perverse in the imagination which sources Ophelia in a weedy ditch, and robs the drowning struggle of that love-lorn maiden of all pathos and beauty”. This version of Ophelia is of a contemporary young male, semi submerged in a setting as likely to have upset The Times – an alpine bog on Mt Ruapehu in the Tongariro World Heritage Park in the central North Island of Aotearoa / New Zealand. This bog was formed in land planed and hollowed out by glacier ice. This alpine wetland hosts alpine bog cushion (Donatia novae-zelandiae), containing rushes, liverworts, sedges, mosses (including peat-forming Sphagnum) and algae.
Even though both images were created in winter. Millais’ model the 19 year old Elizabeth Siddell, posed for hrs in a tub that initially was warmed by oil lamps underneath it . However when these went out Elizabeth was left lying in freezing cold water resulting in a cold. Thanks to the immediacy of photography, 22 yr old Ziggy Lever only had to lie in the near freezing bog for a few minutes.
In choosing to portray Ophelia as a male I am also referencing the theatrical convention of Shakespeare’s time, namely that he would have written the part of Ophelia to be played by a young man. But also this work seeks to highlight Aotearoa/ New Zealand's position, in the OECD, as having the second highest rate of youth suicide, and young Maori men continue to be disproportionately represented in these statistics[1]. Just as Ophelia’s death was shrouded in mystery, little is understood about why teenage boys and young men take their lives in such numbers, and very little effort has been made to understand this alarming trend.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/19/we-have-to-start-talking-about-it-new-zealand-suicide-rates-hit-record-high
This portrait 'Ophelia' is inspired by pre Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais’ famous depiction of the drowned Ophelia, Hamlet’s lover from Shakespeare’s tragedy. At the original painting’s debut at the Royal Academy in London in 1852, critics were dismayed. The Times declared that “there must be something strangely perverse in the imagination which sources Ophelia in a weedy ditch, and robs the drowning struggle of that love-lorn maiden of all pathos and beauty”. This version of Ophelia is of a contemporary young male, semi submerged in a setting as likely to have upset The Times – an alpine bog on Mt Ruapehu in the Tongariro World Heritage Park in the central North Island of Aotearoa / New Zealand. This bog was formed in land planed and hollowed out by glacier ice. This alpine wetland hosts alpine bog cushion (Donatia novae-zelandiae), containing rushes, liverworts, sedges, mosses (including peat-forming Sphagnum) and algae.
Even though both images were created in winter. Millais’ model the 19 year old Elizabeth Siddell, posed for hrs in a tub that initially was warmed by oil lamps underneath it . However when these went out Elizabeth was left lying in freezing cold water resulting in a cold. Thanks to the immediacy of photography, 22 yr old Ziggy Lever only had to lie in the near freezing bog for a few minutes.
In choosing to portray Ophelia as a male I am also referencing the theatrical convention of Shakespeare’s time, namely that he would have written the part of Ophelia to be played by a young man. But also this work seeks to highlight Aotearoa/ New Zealand's position, in the OECD, as having the second highest rate of youth suicide, and young Maori men continue to be disproportionately represented in these statistics[1]. Just as Ophelia’s death was shrouded in mystery, little is understood about why teenage boys and young men take their lives in such numbers, and very little effort has been made to understand this alarming trend.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/19/we-have-to-start-talking-about-it-new-zealand-suicide-rates-hit-record-high
