After a period of ‘calm’ (such as it ever is) I am now at a time of back to back MAKING MADNESS. I have many projects about to happen one after the other with little breathing space in between.
So following on from ‘Fallling Fruit’ (one down, 3, maybe 4 if I’m lucky, to go, till Christmas) my next Multiple Participant Project is ‘Old Soles’ starting on Monday.
This will be 275 illuminated giant paper shoes made by the children of Rushden to take part in a perforamance celebrating the end of Global Footprint, a project concerning the Northamptonshire shoe trade. The performance will be by Watch This Space who are amazing, and for whom I did my first illuminated MPP (Fire Totems for ‘Gunpowder, Treason and Plot at Lyveden New Bield) project back in 2009.
The project is getting the children to look at the history on their doorstep, in their town and involving possibly their own families and years and years of heritage. There are some amazing old photos that have been unearthed. Here are some I used to make my sample shoe. I’m sure the ones that the kids make will be a million times more amazing!
Had a great and frantic day yesterday at MK Gallery.
With two 2 hour workshops in which to create ‘Falling Fruit’ – a new edition of the Strained Fruit variety, it was hectic to say the least. Session one hosted over 25 children and produced some lovely work, in a very short and intense time.
Session 2 in the afternoon was, thankfully, a little calmer, and with some materials getting scarce (I can’t believe over 297m of coloured insulation tape were used in such a short space of time) everybody got really inventive with the resources!
Typically I had over-reached with my ambitions for the day and in the melee two planned elements were abandoned. Firstly, as any readers of my Strained Fruit blog will know, the sounds within the Fruitflowers are notoriously unpredicatable and don’t seem to like warm weather – so were refusing to work in the lovely warm gallery space. Secondly, I had planned some new sounds which need to have a bit more movement from the heads of each plant – and had bought speacially an array of interesting elastic with which to suspend them. It was clear from early on that this was not going to happen – I was too tied up with helping in the actually Fruitflower construction to fiddle about with bits of elastic, and secondly the hoop support structure was not wide enough and too flexible to make extra structuring possible.
However these things didn’t really matter at all, and it is yet another lesson to myself (one that I never remember) – not everything needs to be ‘all singing and dancing’ to work.
In the interests of professionalism I have been doing some research into Superheroes; (and no, I don’t mean that i’ve just had a good excuse to read the Beano) and have found (not having been a comicbook afficianado) that there is an ENORMOUS amount of theory on said subject.
Who knew Superheroes were so intellectual?!
So I did feel somewhat smug when last week on the train home from the seeing the Turner Prize exhibition my copy of ‘Superheroes and Philosophy (Truth, Justice and the Socratic Way)’ edited by Tom & Matt Morris attracted quite a lot of attention. I am also reading: ‘Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero’ by Grant Morrison
all fascinating stuff and having never even seen Superman, it is all news to me.
This is causing me to wonder if I am doing the right thing? By finding out about this stuff, am I likely to kill my mojo by knowing too much? It’s not exactly as if my Superhero series is actually based on or influenced by these actual characters but still……
By knowing too much do you kill the innocent exploration that creates original and personal ideas?
I have always sort of believed this. Long ago I worked in the TV industry and once went for an interview to get a coveted ‘Director’ traineeship. All was going well with my interview panel who were all nodding and making appropriately interested noises until the fateful question….. ‘so, what do you watch?’
Nothing – I watched nothing on TV.
But surely, this would mean that I would have ORIGINAL ideas (which I did, as I was doing a directorial job unofficially at the time) – sadly they did not see it this way. I did, however enjoy the sounds of their jaws all hitting the table in astonishment at my unashamed admission.
SO, chapter 2 or not chapter 2, that is the question…..
Writing blogs is fast becoming my ‘displacement activity’. I can see my letter to the taxman now -‘sorry, couldn’t file my tax return, too busy blogging about socks and noisy fruit….’
So, I wasn’t quite sure under which ‘blog hat’ to post this….Next week I will be doing a Multiple Participant Project (MPP) that follows on from Strained Fruit
www.a-n.co.uk/p/2092137
This will be ‘for one day only’ (get it whilst it’s hot) at MK Gallery Milton Keynes and is a drop-in participatory workshop where we will be making some ‘Falling Fruit’ fruitflowers.
Excitingly, I have some new noises and some more excitiing bits and pieces to create extra-charismatic Fruitflowers – so if you are near Milton Keynes next Friday 2nd November – please come along!
http://www.mkgallery.org/events/2012_11_02/half_te…
Last week I ‘attended’ a PechaKucha night in Wakefield where the subject of the evening was ‘Drawing Lines’ and included many interesting presentations including several which concerned drawing.
One of the speakers Gill Newton (see here at:
www.a-n.co.uk/p/1266395
included a particular reference in her talk that I had seen before but at this particular time seemed highly significant as it is similar in several ways to the Superhero Gadget (Trap 1 – birdcage) that i am currently constructing. It was this Eva Rothschild’s work.
All the next day, after the talk, whilst continuing with this piece I contemplated the combination of both extreme similarities and at the same time, differences and wondered if these things would be a great influence on the perception of the final work.
If her work had also been made from fluroescent pink nylon netting and girlie bows would it have the same ‘weightiness’ and if not – why not.
Is there an artistic hierarchy in materials?
My work has a conceptual starting point, does this add or subtract?
Is there more value in studying the purity of line than the history within old clothes?
And when I find these answers – what should I do with them?
