It’s A Beautiful Life.

Acrylic paint on wooden board.

This post is about my Senior Project for Richmond University. It’s from 3 years ago, but recently I’ve been doing a lot of wondering and debating over both medical things (the good ol’ NHS) and also aspects of sharing with social media. Looking at this, I see I haven’t answered a lot of my ponderings in the past three years.

At the time, I described it as follows:

It’s a Beautiful Life examines the phenomenon of public identity that social networking sites such as Facebook have created. People now can create an illusion of their lives based on their ability to choose what pictures the world sees of them, and base others’ perception of them on those photos. Since people can be selective, everyone only shows the beautiful pictures.

But in a world where people take hundreds of pictures of day-to-day activities, do they still take, post, and share photos of themselves when their day-to-day activities are not spent laughing and having fun, but being in hospital instead? Drawing on her own experiences with undergoing breast cancer testing, Pulham explorers what people do when their lives become less beautiful, and what then happens to their self-indulgent publication of themselves.

The paintings are all based on photos she has either found, or posted, on Facebook.

Here’s the individual paintings:

And how they looked in the show: