Dissecting meaning in an art piece
Project and article by Zhangziyi and Aura Murillo
In psychology, meaning-making is the process of how people construe, understand, or make sense of things. In a broader sense, meaning-making is the main research object of semiotics, biosemiotics, and other fields. Social meaning-making is the main research object of social semiotics and related-disciplines.
Within art, meaning can be created by artists’ and audience’s culture background, their stories, emotions and feelings.
As designers, we decided to find a framework to analyse a painting and question how different people can interpret an artwork from very personal and various perspectives.
In the scanning phrase, we explored the question of how people create meaning in their minds within the context of looking into an art piece. We first extracted 5 different layers in which meaning is framed differently and complimentary: Cultural background (individual), Emotion, memory, context, the artist’s interpretation and a final layer to describe a reinterpretation of the person’s meaning once processed and understood the narrative of the author.
In order to cover the diverse depths of what an art piece can tell, the layers were arranged to change progressively from the abstract to the more concrete.
The exploration continues with a site visit where us as designers from a different cultural background took over the National Galleries of two major cities: London and Singapore. In both places, we chose one landscape painting from an artist of the same city as that specific National Gallery, and we analyzed it both in person and from an online perspective.
In Singapore, we worked with “Singapore River’’, a painting with oil on canvas from Chua Mia Tee. From the London side, we explored “The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up” a painting from 1838 from the famous English painter J.W Turner.
We started to interpret the paintings by standing in front of it. Without looking at the artistic description and other written information, we note down the emotion and memory triggered purely by the image.
From there, we discovered the difference of our own interpretation from the message from the artist. By analysing the same painting, the message can be varied. We wonder how these different analyses can be related.
In the communication stage, illustrations and words are printed out on transparent film to be layered together, symbolise how meanings are formed.
Through this project, these two designers discovered a new form of collaboration across different cultures and spaces through this experimental project of “Meaning-making in art”. They see how people have different interpretations of an artwork when people have different cultural backgrounds and experiences.
By suggesting this initial framework of analysing a painting in different layers, they hope to find a method of looking at things. This method can also be applied to analyze many other objects around us.
