This playful guest post from object artist and songwriter Elena Thomas https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/threads is about objects we desire or indeed need to make progress in our work. Objects can facilitate – change what we can do, can they even change us? Objects as enablers is an intriguing and joyful prospect for The Museum to contemplate. I love Elena’s ability to expand the scope of this enterprise and look forward to the fruits of her first mic.
This museum of objects then…
Does the object have to be old?
Does the object have to be something I already own?
Can it be something shiny and new?
Can it be something I covet?
Can it be an object I have already imbued with hope and change, before I’ve even got my hands on it?
Can it be a microphone?
It is already symbolic for me.
My first microphone
Like my first car… my first house… my first album (Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon… I KNOW!!)
Music has always been a part of my life… it has bumbled along in the background, it has burst out of bedroom windows, and crackled through the car stereo.
I cannot believe that it is only in the last few very recent years it has actually been PART of my work. Why didn’t I know I could do this? I feel like Manny in Black Books, who suddenly and accidentally discovers he can play the piano! (if you haven’t seen it, it’s on Youtube, go find it!)
I have written poems, usually daft ones at school, and later on the occasional ode of love and lust gained and lost.
But music? I don’t know anything about music except what I like, and that it excites me, soothes me, restores balance to my over-excitable, over-emotional life.
I have always sung too… sung along, that is… school choir, shower, very rare karaoke, and drunken crooning.
And now I sing. Now, I sing songs that I have written. This week, just this week, it got serious.
My musical mentor said “Get yourself a decent mic to plug into your mac and your iPad”
It was a cast off sentence… it meant nothing to him other than we need my recordings to be of a higher quality.
But it is symbolic in that it means I have a voice worth recording at a higher quality.
It is symbolic of this change
It is imbued with hope that I can live up to expectations
Black Books clip here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPh53BCJQKE
