I’ve spent a couple of hours going through old emails trying to decide what to share and what not to. For me it’s interesting looking back at what we where thinking at the beginning but the more I’ve cut and pasted snippets into a word document the more I’ve thought about how boring it would be for others to read. So I’m not doing that now…
So what do I want to say? I don’t know, I think I want to tell you how I feel about what we are doing/not doing now rather than then so maybe I should start with what I emailed Franny and Elena not long before we started this collaborative blog:
‘I don’t know how much of this I’ve told you both because I don’t know what is new in my mind and what I’ve just developed now but this is where I’m up to with the thinking of for my part of our projects.
For me everything has changed since we’ve been emailing and it’s become about the distance between us being stripped away because of the internet usually but also about it being so evident when I just want to talk to someone face to face, go for a coffee etc. So I’m thinking of doing something with our online conversations and am thinking of gluing them together somehow (similar to the projects I’ve been doing recently but on a much larger scale), some sort of landscape which shows the distance between us, maybe even exaggerating the distance (in a topography sort of way) between us that seems so, so far sometimes and (sanding down the landscape to obscure the text because I don’t really want others to share our secrets.)’
I did a short book project a few years ago on a trip to Utah where my fellow students and I went on a camping trip whilst visiting Utah, I mixed the topography of the landscape with our conversation.
I knew I wasn’t finished with it and wanted to explore it further but have never found the right conversation. I often collect other peoples conversation, jotting them down when I’m travelling around but it means nothing to me most of the time. I needed a trip or adventure with other companions and I think I’ve found it…
This idea has been floating around my head as something I want to do with ‘our’ conversations for quite a while but I couldn’t get away from the idea of digitally producing it in a similar way to my ‘talking landscapes’ book and this just wouldn’t do. I don’t want to share everything between us with the world! I thought about over typing the conversation to obscure it or layering it up somehow. Weaving it was another idea…
But I didn’t even try any of them out because really I knew they wouldn’t work, they didn’t even look right in my head.
I realised this was the way to go somehow sometime after making my ‘Paper Eggs’ but it wasn’t really until I started experimenting with the stones that I realised I might really be getting somewhere. Because the top surface area is larger than the eggs you can read more of the text.
I don’t know how it will work yet. I think it’s going to be a huge project if I take it on and I’m not sure it’ll work really. The size I want it to be would be a huge problem with the size I can print being much smaller and I’m not sure gluing side by side and overlapping slightly would not effect the over all appearance. Size would also be a problem in the making as I don’t have a studio and how to glue a huge surface area quickly and effectively may be an issue too.
Now when I think about the project (putting these problems to one side) I visualise large broken landscape with hills and valleys but it’s made up in a very similar way to the stones in that there is colour and images as well as text… ummmm, but all we have is dialogue…
