Some kind of strange introduction part one. Origins of a project. Two weeks ago I embarked upon my ‘cheese dreams’ project. This project has been floating around for around two years but it has now taken form. The project involves me sending cheese to 5 volunteers around the UK for a month (one cheese per night) and I ask them to record in a diary, their dreams. I will then take all of the diaries and produce data, analysis and an exhibition/event from the findings. The first exhibition will be at ‘Magpie Thunder Bureau pop up’ as part of Barnaby Festival in June this year! So, you can obviously (?!) guess, I am an artist who works in a cheese shop! yES I am one of THOSE many people that works to support their practice, and hasn’t received any kind of funding :( Being a product of my time though, I am very good at being resourceful and really do believe that we should use our surroundings (however far away they are to where you want to be) as inspiration to create interesting things/projects. The project first started when another deli i worked in a couple of years ago, shut down. I went into the empty deli when all the furniture was being ripped out and managed to nick the giant chalkboard with all the cheeses we sold written on, and an apron too. I don’t know why I took them, I just thought I might use them or maybe I just felt sad seeing the objects left behind, which is silly I know. I took the objects to my studio (I was doing a ‘graduate intern scheme’ and I got use of a studio for a year) and kept going back to them over again but not being able to come up with any thing. I started thinking about ‘roles’ and ‘exchange’ a lot at this point… I wanted to somehow play with the role of worker turned confidant as what I missed about work was certain people, I began to miss the customers that were what some people might call ‘a bit mental’ but they used to make my day, they would talk to me and confide in me alsorts of things about their life. They thought I was a pleasant girl, turstworthy and some of the older customers would tell me about how they used to take great pride in their skill or trade and how it’s all changed now… The customers stories created a lot of my art work at the time, but they’ll never know that. http://www.cheesedreamsproject.tumblr.com
