“Hi Rosie, forgive me if I state something you have covered earlier, I have not yet had time to review all your posts. I have skimmed this most recent page and it strikes me that your plan drawings make for very good art in their own right, even if their original purpose is not known. I could certainly see them presented as a serial work recording an exploration of space. Of course, making the gallery experience a reality is (I think) very important to you, but the work recorded here in this blog is important too.”
This comment on my last post from David Riley is very similar in ideas to what I talked about with my tutor. So thanks David, this has been really useful to help me think about things. I’ve found writing this blog incredibly useful as a way of thinking about my practice, and it will probably form a large part of my documentation that I must submit alongside my degree show work.
I have been concerned that I’m getting ahead of myself with my plans to build a gallery space. We have been reminded a lot recently not to get too hung up on one idea at this stage as we could end up ignoring other (possibly better) possibilities. I’ve kept telling myself that I couldn’t think of any other ideas, but I think that really I just wasn’t making the effort. I seem to have jumped straight to the most obvious result of my research and it is perhaps a bit clumsy and also unnecessary. I may go back to these ideas, and I am still going to build a cardboard mock up that will help me explore my ideas around designing a space.
But for the next few weeks or so I am going to concentrate on ideas that have arisen following my tutor’s advice to make a list of as many ways I could think of to physically alter a space. My head has been so set on building something that I have missed other things about my practice that work well. As David said in the above comment the drawings I have made of floor plans are quite interesting in their own right and not just as rough plans. I also want to look at other ideas which I will test in the studios and the cardboard space that I am going to create this week.
I’m quite excited to be looking at other things, especially as I have been having doubts that building something in the way I have been thinking may not work. I hope that this post doesn’t make me appear to be feeling negative about my ideas to build a space, I will still keep that idea in mind. But my research has lead me to think about a number of different characteristics of a gallery and by building my own space I offer only one solution. And it is a solution that has been done time and time again – build a different gallery.
