Leah

Meet The Artist:

Hi, I’m Leah and I’m in my second year of Studio Art. I enrolled in this program, for I always knew I wanted to pursue art as a career, and I was particularly fond of the size of this program and the tight knit and supportive community it offered. I love exploring mediums and creating pieces inspired my conceptual ideas. I have recently been trying to allow myself to create work based on the process and not the outcome, aiming to further develop my practice and how I am connected to it. Sketches and smaller pieces have been a big part of this experience, but I am excited to apply these goals to bigger pieces throughout this course!

Existing Work:

The Artist is present, Marina Abramovic:

My initial impression of the works by Abramovic tends to fall towards the prevalence of nudity throughout her pieces, which generates a shock factor, especially for people who are not artists. As artists there is a sense of comfortability for the majority with nudity and the human body, but for many people this unavoidable acknowledgement must be given towards the presence of nudity and this often generates a feeling of discomfort, which seems to be a prominent theme of her work.

One of the main factors of her performance that remains the most prevalent to me is the discipline, which functions as the foundation for her pieces. Her pieces are often very demanding both physically and mentally, and that tends to be a very important aspect of her work, for the required discipline allows viewers to be both shocked and uncomfortable. Her discipline allows her to perform through reality, for she forces herself to be physically uncomfortable, which really allows the audience to feel the sacrifice she is making, generating a strong viewer impact.

Rhythm 5, Marina Abramovic, 1974

Abramovic challenges museum conventions through the confrontation she pushes upon audiences, for often it is expected that a person would simply wander around a gallery or museum space casually viewing paintings or sculptures, yet Marina works directly against that. She forces the viewer to acknowledge her work directly through the physical presence, creating uncomfortability, for this is not the norm, especially in reference to traditional artwork. Performance art and the body as a medium is very confrontational and forces the audience to directly interact with the piece, yet Abramovic works to create even more uncomfortability within the nudity and jarring discipline in her work, which is what make her pieces so memorable.

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762.5 Breaths: One Kilometer

762.5 Breaths: One Kilometer, Leah Tipping, 2026 (paper, matches, jar)

For this piece I decided to measure a kilometer of breath. In order to measure this I had my roommate hold a match and see the furthest distance in which I could blow the match out from, this ended up being 1.3 meters. I then did the math to determine how many times 1.3M goes into 1 kilometer, giving me my final number of 762.5 breaths. 

To create this piece I lit and blew out a match to represent each individual breath, and then used the previous lit end of the match to create a tick on my large piece of paper. This allowed me to create a large tally chart, which is equal to 762.5, following me drawing with the match I dropped the burnt match into a glass jar, which I also presented. 

My motivation for this piece was my current journey quitting smoking, and how my personal lung health generates a unique amount of breaths for myself and my health. This number is also reflective for me, allowing myself to consider how I am preventing this number of breaths from continuing to grow by quitting. I chose to create a tally chart in addition to just presenting the matches, for the tallys remind me of an incarcerated person counting the amount of days they have been in jail; representative of the inescapable hold smoking has had on me and my life. 

I aimed to encourage myself to allow the materials of my piece to more deeply connect with my work for this piece; instead of just picking a medium that I think would be the most appealing visually. I believe that using the matches as my main material has been very productive to my work, and has created depth in my work. Furthermore, this material choice has also further connected my creative process to peace and the motivations behind it. The act of actually sitting down and blowing as hard as I could 762.5 times was powerful, allowing myself to actually physically blow one kilometer. This repetitive motion almost felt like an inverse of smoking, reminiscent of my previous habit of repetitive inhaling, now juxtaposed by this repetitive practice of exhales.

Something I wish I was able to encorperate into the process of this piece is actually blowing the matches out from a consistent distance of 1.3 meters. I think that if I had more time I could have organized having another person assist me with the entirety of this project, having them hold the match at a distance for me to blow, yet th turn around time was unfortunately too short to accomodate this. I considered trying to create a setup that would be able to hold the lit match at the proper distance for me, yet I could not come up with a way to achieve this utilizing the resources accesible to me without creating a fire hazard. Since this was something I could not do, I resorted to blowing as hard as I could in order to still allow my breath to travel the 1.3 meters even if the match was not able to be at that distance.

Portion of process, timelapse