University Campus Suffolk

The images in this post are of a revisited piece of work that I created last week.

Last year, I was working on ideas of society, family, friends and how each individual person within a family or within society connects and reacts to one another. This piece was my mark on these ideas – by recreating a flock of birds I was able to make a comment about society.

This work is rather personal to me as an individual in society, as a student, a friend and a member of the Follen family – a daughter, sister, granddaughter and girlfriend and where my place in all these relationships is.

By creating a flock of birds out of fabric, – fabrics that meant something to me or my friends – using different colours, tones and textures, I was also able to comment on the different personalities within society.

By revisiting this piece and recreating it in a different way for the degree show catalogue I have been able to revisit and re think about this piece much deeper than I could beforehand. I have learnt from revisiting this piece and taking a step back once it was up and observing the piece as well as photographing it – I have responded slightly differently this time around than when I first created it. Although all the initial family and societal reasoning’s are still there they appear to be much stronger now – and I hope as a viewer that you can bring your own thoughts to my piece but also respond in the way that I do.

*Thanks Matt for letting me take up part of your space :) *

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POST UPDATE [19/05/2013]

Love my black bird cage … not quite sure what I am to do with it once finished Uni though hmmm ….

Anyway quick update – By revisiting this piece I think I was able to bring some of the family, friends and society elements into my current work as well as rethink some of my thoughts about this piece. I feel that of the two bird pieces (Birds in Flight and Flock of Birds) I prefer the new version as the birds have become more than just a flock they have become another form.

New card reader brought som I can get my films and photos from the other day off to look at – lets hope this works
…

It works yayyyy … 2GB’s worth of film though to move over … il leave that to do when I’m at uni in a bit …

Blog review today !

So I have booked the white installation for this week and next week – and spent the majority of today sat on the floor, in a corner of the space surroundedby paper bars.

Sitting in the space waiting for Amanda to bring me a cuppa tea surrounded by these paper bars I started to feel a little bit lonely. I had been in the space from about 10am this morning and had spent at least an hour and a half building the caged environment. Whilst creating I hadnt really felt anything because I was concentrating on building and excited about what the structure was going to look like once complete. But once it had all been built and I was sat in the space for half an hour waiting and wondering how long Amanda would be … I began to feel other emotions. I felt trapped, scared, and a great sense of vulnerability. I felt trapped like an animal (which is good as this was the main point to the whole experiment … and because i was waiting for Amandait was as almost I became an animals in a zoo. As John Berger says in his book Why Look At Animals? that animals in zoos become almost dependent on their keepers, I almost became dependent on Amanda getting there so I could leave. The amount of people that are walking past the door is amazing but made me feel quite vulnerable because only a handful of people (as in 4) who knew what I was doing and it got me thinking about how silly I was going to look if someone came in.

After about half an hour of just sitting on the floor … waiting … Amanda turned up and I crawled out of my cage. I think I should of sat there longer .. . but I think I definitely need something to do whilst in the space as it gets quite lonely and boring.

I would currently love to show you some images of the space yesterday and what I have done today as well as some stills from the films I took … but my computer doesnt seem to want to pick up the sd card.

For now though, I’ll put up some images I captured using my mobile from inside my cage. (The wonders of masking tape and parcel tape – lets hope it stays up).

A short post, (actually a quote) – from John Berger’s Why Look At Animals?

Ive been trying to write a post on this part of Berger’s book for a while – but felt that I wasn’t making myself too clear – so thought I’d post a quote from the book – hoping that this will start to explain some of my current thinking ….

“The décor, accepting these elements as tokens, sometimes reproduces them to create pure illusion – as in the case of painted prairies or painted rock pools at the back of the boxes for small animals. Sometimes it merely adds further tokens to suggest something of the animal’s original landscape – the dead branches of a tree for monkeys, artificial rocks for bears, pebbles and shallow water for crocodiles. These added tokens serve two distinct purposes: for the spectator they are like theatre props: for the animal they constitute the bare minimum of an environment in which they can physically exist.

The animals, isolated from each other and without interaction between species, have become utterly dependent upon their keepers.”

(More description of this and work to come)

Berger. J (2009) Why Look at Animals? Penguin: London
(pp.34-35)

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POST UPDATE [17/05/2013]

The parts of this quote highlighted in bold are what I feel are the important parts which relate to my work (drawings). The last bold sentence “The animals, isolated from each other and without interaction between species” is very important to my work (past and present).

I want to recreate a zoo enclosure scenario (where animals aren’t allowed to mix – predator and prey animals are kept seperate – for good reasons the predator will eat the prey animal) and where the animal becomes dependable on their keepers for food etc. These factors among others create an artificial setting for the animal to live within and so makes nearly everything they do artificial as well.

(On a personal note – don’t get me wrong I love zoos – who doesn’t – a chance to get up close to living predators who would probably try and kill you if they got the chance to (as well as the conservation part that zoos do) but doing this project seems to have made me think twice about them, which is a good thing because I feel like I can appreciate zoos possibly more than I did before.

Picture Reference

PD Smith (2009) Why Look at Animals? By John Berger [Online] Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/19/why-look-animals-john-berger Accessed: 19/05/2013

Second blog of the day … Further development of a zoo/human installation design.

After a recent tutorial, I realised that I was trying to recreate a homely feeling in my space – for example take the previous post where I was thinking of recreating a living room design, I was thinking of using pieces of furniture and recreating a room in my studio space with chairs, tables, bookcases etc.

Whilst discussing the designs (both in previous post) with my tutors it got me thinking about zoo enclosures more and more, and how although for the animals (and also the visitors to the exhibits), the environments are all recreated with the materials the keepers have to hand, be it tyres for monkeys to swing about on, large rocks for lions to sit on, or even the painted backgrounds of the outdoor and indoor enclosures that the animals inhabit, the space they occupy is not their natural habitat like in the wild, but a very clever recreated space for the animals to inhabit. This idea is what I have been searching for, for the past few months …

A visit to a zoo seems to be needed soon …