I’ve been lucky to have had plenty of time at the workshop this year. Investigating everyday objects and materials, I have kept the parameters in which I am working broad, allowing my environment and the things within it to direct me.
Walking, noticing, collecting… photography, video, collage, drawing, making…
This open-ended process has allowed me to explore a lot of things in a short period of time but recently I’ve starting to feel a bit overwhelmed. My work is going in multiple and diverse directions – everything feels too broad and a bit disconnected. What are the relations between the objects? What direction(s) do I want to take? Do some parameters now need to be set? What are these parameters and why?
Photo: Things among things, 2020, objects, materials: found aluminium bottle, found tin lid, electrical wire, coat hanger, found stainless steel, furniture paint, gifted copper.
Last week I decided to step back and look at what I’ve made. At the workshop, surrounded by tools, equipment, materials, unfinished and old work I couldn’t think or see clearly. The objects needed space.
So… I turned my living room into a ‘gallery’ (luckily my partner is used to our house getting upended for my projects!) This allowed me to play with the positioning of the objects, to see the objects not as things sitting on my workbench but with space around them, forming relations with the other objects in the installation.
Photo: Displaying the work on an old mattress allowed me to position the objects in interesting ways – creating tension by pressing them into the foam or tying them at odd angles.
While my “exhibition” was only up for an hour, installing the work has been an important step in the process of understanding where I am going with it. Following, are some questions, observations, and things I will be thinking about going forward.
What are the key objects and what are the objects that hold the other objects up? (Iris Eichenberg at Masterclass 2020).
Setting up the objects in this display, I thought back to the Masterclass with Iris Eichenberg and questioned: what are the key objects? I have made a lot of ‘secondary objects’ (objects that hold the other objects up) but I feel that there is a lack of these primary pieces.
I also noticed that my work has become more 2-dimensional and object-based. How can I bring in both 3-dimensionality and wearability to my work? I want to think more about how the objects relate to the body through jewellery, touch and interactivity. Could these wearable and 3-dimensional pieces be the key objects that are currently missing?
I want to think more about what the objects mean by themselves. What is their material meaning? Their semiotic meaning? What do the objects mean in relation to each other?
Finally, the relationship between the objects in the display didn’t feel clear. I need to think about narrowing down my focus and think more about how things connect. What are my parameters? What are my rules?
Many questions have come out of this exercise and not so many answers (yet) but as Iris said in the Masterclass earlier this year “sometimes something will become something later… give it time.” I will be doing just this over the next few weeks with details in a future blog post!