February 12th continued
I'm showing the dress piece I was working on over Christmas, together with another two that I've made since. The corridor is entirely empty apart from these dresses and four spotlights. I've got them set up at the end of the space, hanging from cotton threads with are sewn into the exposed seams. These in turn hang from a couple of wooden sticks, which is hanging from a single thread from the ceiling. This methods means that the structure of the dresses isn't squashed, but also means that they spin and move when people walk past. I've been thinking about different ways of lighting work since Still Lives in the summer. On this occasion, I've got two different lighting set ups depending on the time of day. When there's plenty of natural light, I've tried to highlight the dresses themselves, to emphasise the subtle colour differences in the fabric. During the evening, I'm lighting them from further away, so that there's a range of shadows. From the end of corridor during this set-up, the dresses themselves seem to disappear, or at least become less visually prominent – you see the shadows first.
I'm not sure how successful this is. Whilst I've gotten quite a bit of positive feedback, there are a couple of things that keep reoccurring – the fact that they are female forms, and that people think they look ghost-like. I chose a female form primarily because I wanted to give an impression of more than just a torso, and with one item of clothing, as I wanted it to hang without a break, and so that it could fade away at the bottom. And at least in Western culture, a dress is the really the only item of clothing that is a total body covering by itself. As far as the ghost comment is concerned, whilst there are ‘ghosts' involved, echoes and traces from unknown people, I'd rather things were a little more subtle than a Boo. (Continues)
