My piece is a based on a memory of my Great Grandmothers house. However i like the idea of the veiwer imagination, i like to think of this piece also as perhaps a waiting room from a different realm where people can come and re-connect with their old memories.
The dated wallpaper an items may seem old fashioned but in this piece it acts as a timeless scene. I have created a wall of a room. It could be a waiting room a living room, it is all perceptive from the audience. The photos displayed are all from different times and ages for instance, there is one of my father when he was about 9 and one of my mother when she was 17 and my Grandpa at 55 and so on. This shows how although times change people and memories do too. people come to look different as do memories.
The table diplayed acts as a slpit second look, giving the feel as though there is a presence. The coffee cups and the ashtray is a setup for the common meseting, as people around the world meet up for coffee chit-chats, to reminice. However again it is all a matter of perception. ‘were people just chit chatting?’ or were they waiting for something else?
The telephone and string attached to the photos, is very important, it adds more questions to the piece. I have used it to act as a metaphor for connecting people to their memories of life with these people.
Since having my degree show sorted in my mind, i started going around all the antique and charity shops around where i live. I wanted my space to be dated, almost timeless, to gice the peice a feel of lost time or perhaps as if it were a waiting room in in the afterlife, oor even more so a memory of my own granparents house, but this is all perceptive of the viewer which is the interesting thing about installation.
I found myself the perfect dated gold framed mirror. The great thing about it to me is that it is rose tinted, which gives off almost an illusion effect, that everything is not as it seems, much with the idea of memories at times.
I also collected a lot of frames around my house i wanted them to be quite different whilst still looking dated, i think the fact that they are different and lined oddly gives the impression of an imperfect set up, much like family living rooms and more so life in general.
Again i have been looking into Christian Boltanski’s work, there is such a strong sense of memory that carries throughout his work. This time i have particularly looking at Lessons of Darkness. As i have said before the eeriness, of his installations the enlarged phots attached with wire or string to other photod with little lights above them really bring the photos to life. It makes the viewer really think about these people, the lives they had, what they were like and all these other questions. This is something i would like the viewer to think of and wonder whilst looking at my work. Also i would like to create a certain atmosphere as Boltanski does, an eeriness, another world perhaps.
