Notes from my sketchbook: Trying to ‘write-up’ a month’s worth of ideas and experiments seems like a rather trite and pointless task (I still haven’t gotten the balance between spontaneous blogging and my need to have anything I write planned and carefully considered beforehand) so I’m attempting a different approach – what follows are a series of expanded notes from my sketchbook where I work out concepts and comment on ideas as I try them out.
04/03/10
I’ve had several ideas about various objects and materials I’ve gotten hold of, but I’m not sure how they relate to each other (if indeed they do) and how these ideas relate to where I think my practice is heading.
Several of the leather gloves, seams unpicked, lying on the floor. Tried this out, but not sure they should be on the floor – what’s the reason? Seductive quality of gloves, most apparent with soft, supple ones; prised open, the interiors exposed to the air. Impressed into plaster walls?
Photographic prints on sausage skin- interest in using this material comes from it’s use to repair old vellum books, vellum having a ‘memory’ (after damp has penetrated it, then it’s dried to another shape, it keeps going back to that shape, despite later attempts to restore it). Which is interesting, but perhaps more down the archive route that my work is currently going in. Also, by using the skin as a support for a photograph, isn’t this just making the skin into a canvas?
Photographing / filming our house – particularly in the empty living room; ‘living’ being part of the point, it’s not currently being lived in. It’s an empty ignored room. Can the act of photographing / filming be an act in itself? What if I wear long leather gloves and a negligee whilst doing this? Photographs of empty living room with leather gloves in shot – a set up, a staging?
Is there a way of incorporating sound and smell into the work?
14/03/10
I’ve placed the old carpet from our living room on a wall. The carpet is the size (4 x 4.7m) and shape of the living room – you can see where the carpet lay under the door, where the bay window was, where the fireplace and chimney breast projected into the room.
Carpet on the wall – references to a canvas, paintings placed on the wall. But it’s the size and shape of a room, removed from its original context, opened up for examination. Is placing it on the wall trying to change the fact it’s a carpet? Elevating the status of it? Is it becoming a surface as opposed to an object? Everydayness of carpet – is this negated by placing it on a wall? Or has it just shifted its inherent everydayness somewhere else?
How to light it? Layers of different indents and traces highlighted by setting up a lighting programme, which gradually changes over time. So a time element also becomes part of the piece. Would it need sound too? Traces as sounds and smell (the carpet certainly does smell). But again, perhaps this is trying to add too much to a single piece.
I’m trying to think of ways of not making something, ways of manipulating the objects in other manners.
(continues)
