Theses are some photos of a few days of my daily collections. I feel they look better as a group, so hopefully as I keep collecting and creating these boards they will really work together in harmony. I still have the dates written on the wall at the moment, but I plan to write the dates on the boards. I wasn’t too sure whether to or not at first but a tutorial with Jane helped me realised that the dates are actually quite important with these pieces. Without the dates it is still a collection of daily items discarded from me, but will the viewer realise this without the dates?
I realised how fragile these boards are going to be once I accidentally caught one of my contacts and it flicked off the board taking the paint with it. So I will have to be careful when handling them for the degree show when I move all my stuff to my space, as I don’t want to damage them.
After a lot of rearranging I finally came up with my final board (#8). I decided on this as I felt neither side was too over crowded, and everything was kept a good distance apart. I measured the centre of each wipe to be in the same place so this consistency would run throughout my boards. However, due to the fact they are material and fairly stretchy one way, they wouldn’t be consistently exactly the same shape but due to what I’m collecting i knew this wouldn’t be possible. But I felt for them to be most aesthetically pleasing they at least had to look consistent, even if they weren’t completely accurate.
The wipe was placed central from either side, but slightly higher than centre so I could have the four cotton wool balls evenly spaced beneath it. I then spaced the contact lenses and eyelashes (if I had collected any that day) a similar distance apart (top, middle and bottom of wipe). I decided to tie my bunch of hair in a knot at the top. I think I was influenced to do this after reading so much about Jenine Shereos and how she knots hair and sews with it. By doing this it kept all the strands contained together where I could then just glue the hair to the board by this knot rather than having to try and make sure all the strands were glued on together and keep a consistency throughout that way.
Now I have my 30 boards painted white I decided to start experimenting with my collections on them.
Now I had a perfect square to work with I felt a bit restricted to where I could stick things and realised I was going to have to be quite strict to get the right composition and for them all to look similar. I think I had got too used to sticking my collections straight on the wall quite simply with blue tack and masking tape. Although I had arranged them on the wall they weren’t contained to a set space some were wider than others, sometimes the hair would be longer than others.
At first this idea began to be quite daunting as I had to get it right as I would have 30 pieces all looking like this time the degree show, so it was important that I figure out the right composition now. I began to play around with the composition for quite some time seeing what did and didn’t work.
My first idea was to keep the same sort of square composition as I tried to have on the wall however as the wipe is square shape and the other items aren’t it was hard trying to arrange them without the wipe appearing to take over the board.
I played around about the positioning of each of the collections. The make-up wipe was the one I felt I needed to arrange first due to the larger size than the rest. I tried positioning it to the side but I felt it made you focus too much on one side and not take as much notice as the rest which wasn’t what I wanted.
I also realised once experimenting with this arrangement why was I using my contact lens cases? My contacts, eyelashes, hair, cotton wool and wipe all have a personal trace of my remains on them. Whereas, the cases are obviously personal to me as they are what my lenses came out of, however they don’t contain my remains which I feel is the whole point in these boards. Therefore I started rearranging without these cases. I also got rid of the cotton wool with nail varnish on as I felt they were too inconsistent and would be hard to make all of the boards follow the same pattern if some had these on and some didn’t, so I felt it was best to leave them out altogether.
I decided to try out an idea I have been wanting to do for a while, which was to suspend my painted toiletry bottles in my space. I attached the easiest ones to hang first, to see if it worked before attempting the harder shaped ones.
I only hung a few up. In a way I do feel they work better suspended in my space like this because of the mesmerising look of them, however, I think my bottles have lost contact with my work now. As much as I try new ideas with them and try and make them work, I feel they do not have the personal link like my other collections, which may be the lacking problem. I feel they have helped my work develop to where it has got to now, but my work has progressed since so I should leave these and carry on with my more recent work.
I left them hanging in my space for a few days to see if my ideas changed. However they began to get in the way of the collections I was hanging on my studio wall, distracting me and I kept walking into them. So I decided to take them all down to help me focus on my new work.
Another artist on a-n suggested to me to look at the artist Bela Kolarova whose work I hadn’t seen before now, but I really like her work. Her work is a lot about feminism and waste materials. She uses the grid approach similar to Agnes Martins, which appears to be a similar approach within collecting. I feel my collections such as the ones I am mounting on the wall at the moment relate to this grid system.
