I was surprised (and very pleased!) to have been selected to show work during the 7 month event Embark: Ferry Art, way down here in the west of Cornwall. Like little seeds blowing in the wind we send out applications far and wide and inevitably most of them don’t take; often it feels like none of them will ever take.
Other than pure luck, I think that one of the difficulties is knowing exactly what a successful application looks like. You try and marry up your interests with the prospective opportunity and hope for the best. When the rejection letter comes with that inevitable line "we were inundated with very strong applications", you wonder why your own wasn’t strong enough and what you could have done to convince them otherwise. Also, if you’re like me, you want to see exactly what those successful proposals looked like, so you can compare it to your own. But sadly, this type of opportunitiy is rarely afforded!
My own application for the Embark project was short and fairly loose. The call for proposals asked people to respond to the local environment (environmental issues, politics, etc) and the siting of the work on the ferry. Of course, applicants also needed to bear in mind that the work would be printed onto adhesive vinyl and displayed by sticking the work to the walls of the car ferry, which are open to the elements.
This is what I wrote (verbatim!):
"My practice is driven by a need to try and understand the intangibility of what makes us who we are, which has recently included a sense of identifying with and using birds found in my locality on Mylor Creek (not far from the King Harry Ferry) as a metaphor for self. It is particularly important to me that the birds I use are found by me and that they are found in my local environment; this way I feel that I have a tangible connection with the work I make with them, and through the work the birds become more than metaphor and become symbolic.
"I use sculptural installation to explore my interests, but a large part of my practice includes drawing and it’s this media that I would like to explore for the KHF [King Harry Ferry] project. I am intrigued by the idea of the work being ‘stuck’ to the walls of the ferry and immediately thought of what it feels like to be ‘stuck’ in the geographically remote county of Cornwall, which is something I have often felt. I envisage continuing with drawings of birds found locally to explore this idea. We normally associate birds with being free, but many of the birds I draw are dead, killed by cars or my cats. For me feeling stuck is like being in an invisible cage, and I really like the idea of a symbol of freedom being literally restricted by the glue that holds it to the wall; if I feel geographically stuck in Cornwall from time to time, what is the glue that keeps me here?
"Some of my latest drawings include cut outs and I wonder at the potential to actually cut shapes from the adhesive revealing what lies beneath, or perhaps building it up in layers, so that the material itself becomes part of the work. I would also like to play with scale, scaling up small garden birds to a much larger size to see what effect this has. I would possibly use the banner/s vertically rather than horizontally so that the viewer can see the bird from a distance with the naked eye, revealing the fauna around us in an unexpected way, and hopefully engaging people with the beauty of the small things here in Cornwall that might usually go unnoticed."
I don’t know if publishing just this one successful application will help much in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully it might encourage some other artists out there to do something similar, so that we can all see what we’re actually striving for!
For more information about Embark take a look at the organisers website: CAN Project. To find out whether my final artwork actually matches my proposal call back to this blog soon for more updates! To see more of my work see my website www.stephanieboon.co.uk
