Watching this year’s L6 full-timers prepare for their degree show (private view tonight – VERY exciting and good luck to everyone!) has brought it home to me that it is technically only a matter of months before I have to do the same thing. I need to start gathering ideas for how my work could be displayed! I’m hoping to have more ideas by then, but so far:
Idea 1:
Cover a white wall with box frames containing all the tracing paper pictures.
Idea 2:
Create a white – or black – space set up as a white – or black – living room, and project the tracing paper images onto the room. I think it would be appropriate to link the emotional pull of the narrative images with the human attachment to a sentimental idea of home and the identity that goes with it. This doesn’t give much scope for displaying the actual images though.
Idea 3:
Construct a kind of altar from the tracing paper images in light boxes. This would hopefully represent the basic sentimental human need to find meaning in life’s events/memories. It could be a religious kind of altar, although I’d have to make difficult decisions about religious style/architecture – and possibly open a can of theological worms. Or it could be a domestic altar – like a mantelpiece/hearth … I could incorporate my slideshows by using televisions. After all, there aren’t many hearths that don’t have a tv as their centrepiece these days.
In 2013 I went to Matt’s Gallery in London to see Mike Nelson’s ‘More things (to the Memory of Honoré de Balzac)’ – which was brilliant. Showing in the neighbouring space was Susan Hiller’s ‘Channels’. This was essentially a wall of televisions each broadcasting a recording of people talking about near death experiences. I don’t think she intended it to have religious symbolism, but even so it was a bank of dazzling tvs that commanded the space very like an altar screen, and she had assembled the similar stories to give them a collective significance they might not otherwise have had. That is the kind of effect that would suit the images and narratives I have been examining.
Here is a link to the Matt’s Gallery page for the exhibition.
