during my silk mill residency i spoke to many people during the times open to the public. one of the most significant conversations was with a lady who was researching her public realm strategy development proposal for the mill.
within the high energy environment of the figment festival i saw her again and didn’t know what would develop.
i don’t really understand what it is she’s working on and i’ve said so in our ongoing email exchanges. what is inspiring though is that my position is embraced and woven into our verbal conversations around the subject. in conversation it makes more sense. once again i learn about my processing of language within specific forms.
in the last 2 weeks we’ve been chatting about a brief inviting responses loosely formed around an idea of mapping. i was invited to propose something. i kept my shared thoughts simple, shared some examples of previous work and have been invited to create the work. it’s important for me to record i was able to propose something because of our dialogues. this is in line with my research in 2014 where i discovered successful proposals involved verbal dialogues within the process of responding to them.
i’ve begone my initial research for the project.
at the time of writing about the residency de-brief i mentioned the steam tots programme. that’s been growing in popularity and i’ve been gaining lots of experience and had many conversations with parents.
i’ve taken part in a stitching workshop at the mill. over the summer i observed at a distance groups stitching and wanted to learn more and start to bridge the gap i’d started to feel. i’ve learnt some basic stitches and applied these to a net panel with cutouts of my hands. visitors to the mini maker faire later in the month will be able to see all the panels from the workshop being assembled into one piece. my panel is the one with two left hands.
as well as beginning something i’ve finished something. a personal project in the kitchen at home. it’s taken three iterations to complete lighting the kitchen cupboards. one cupboard is the master, generating the changing led states and the other via a wireless connection is the slave following what happens in the master. i’m rather pleased to have finished it. i’ve developed some new desktop images from the documentation photographs.
there’s something else happening too. i agreed to be part of the mobile project lab project at the mill. the project will take the museum experience out to the derby hospital and is aiming to include visits to patients on wards as well as day rooms and waiting rooms. the research for the project arrived at two objects being needed, one for the bedside visits and one for the room settings. my current main role is to prototype the display unit for the room setting and to add some complimentary led illumination to the bedside chair.
the shelves many many criteria to fulfil, not least that they can be transported in a taxi. my research has been around arriving at something made from cardboard. the museum currently has objects on display in transparent hex pods, made in house during the re:make project. the idea being that the object is fully observable from all sides.
i’ve picked up on the hexagon and have been prototyping a maquette that will be next worked up into a full size model for team approval.
