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P.V.A clothing dress, shorts and skirt

Before:

After:

Reflection

I had this idea, it came to me on the coach on the way to Amsterdam when I was trying to explain to the person sitting next to me what I do within my practice as an artist, I was describing how objects such as clothing carry traces when I suddenly thought how buildings with traces of the past are memorialised, but could that be said for the clothing of the people who occupy them? Can a piece of clothing be through of as a building? They are both structures that are designed for people to inhabit. I started later to experience with this concept, by using different materials like plaster, P.V.A glue, and spray paint to begin to evolve the function of the object into something that was more fitting to memorialise the people that used to wear it. By coating the objects in these materials I am removing some of there individuality and making them a shroud of the person who used to wear them. The resulting objects are almost set in one position; which reminds me of the tragedy of the city of Pompeii, where the citizens were buried alive under molten lava. The work I have created here has a personal meaning for me as a used clothes that were heading to be thrown away by my sister, enriching the connotations of the work. To develop this work further I plan to experiment with more natural materials like stone, plasters, cement to name a few. I believe this will bring an element of weight with it that will link the sculptures future to ruins. I also feel as through the spray paint although it gave good coverage to the object, it failed to produce the stiffness you expect with decay. Thus leaving it in a state of limbo, which although interesting in it's own right is not what I was aiming to do in the terms of this work.

Gaston Bachelard - House and Universe / Pierra Nora - Realms of memory - Research

Reflection: understanding underling themes

Memory is as changeable as the wind, yet we rely on it constantly to tell us everything we need to know about the lives we have lived and who we are as people up to this point. However we want to present ourselves, our historical knowledge of what has gone before is not at all like memory, and instead creates a discontinuity between us and the past. When we try to recall a piece of memory to the forefront of our minds, it is always marginally different, this is because memory is a fluid and every changing object.  To elaborate, a quotation from Nora, "what we call memory today is not memory but already history"  - Now to examine that statement in more detail, a memory that has been dormant in our minds for years can be recalled at least in part by a trigger that could be made of of virtually anything. The trigger now becomes part of the memory itself that is altered every time it is summoned. There is now multiple thread of history, there is the factual history of the moment, the recorded history of the moment, the subjective history of that moment and the subsequent replays of that combined hotchpotch. Therefore each memory that we think we have, has already been archived into the fragmented personal history each of us carry around with us. Thus making it useless if we actually remembered everything in clinical factual terms, as it wouldn't teach us about ourselves and allow us to grow as individuals. 

Collaboration with Daisy-Mae. - Reflection

Collaborative Project Outcomes 

For this mini project, I started by looking at my practice and thinking about who I know that explores similar interests and concerns as I do. I immediately thought of my friend Daisy-Mae who has been working on trapping moments in resin. For our collaborative mini project we began by getting together and discussing the where our starting base should be. It soon became clear that although our ideas where similar, our ways of working were not. This difference it seems has become an interesting thing, a sort of dialogue if you will between our individual practices. Through conversation we agreed on the parameters of our shared collaboration. We were both going to use soap as the main material within our work, as we liked the notion that objects as representations of memory, that could be trapped within the soap, and over time if used would be washed away. We agreed before practical began that we would not communicate whilst the work was being made so that we couldn't influence each others thought processes. 

My Experimentation

Developed narrative

 

Final Results

Reflection: From Group Crit

The curiosity of seeing for the first time what each other has made was electric, what was interesting was how without discussing at all, both of our works were focused on recording evidence in some way. Daisy-Mae started researching into crime that had happened near her home town in Liverpool, she became fascinated by the crimes involving children as this seems the greatest juxtaposition of all, as children are symbolic in representing innocence and purity. I myself began by looking into fragmented memory from an event, for example a memory has many different components, as well that the deliberate actions themselves, there are accidental triggers to unlocking memory, such as the time of year it happened, where geographically it took place. The clothing you wore on that day, etc, etc. We both started experimentation, by trying to take though chance elements and lock them into a memory bar made from soap. I then started to think of memory in the terms of a string of events that are connected yet disjointed. Therefore, I attached the forms to rope in hope that they would better link together as a fragments of an event, or that informed and event. The soap is hard to work with as a material, as items started sinking down or floating to the surface, this enriched the narrative of being based on a crime. After reviewing my work thus far I decided to develop an element that started to stand out to me as being the most successful. By taking images from an unknown source and cutting out pictures of individuals, I am creating a narrative of unknown truth or myth.  Inspired by the parish notice boards I had seen frequently as a child, walking home from school, I wanted to make something that was familiar yet defamiliar simultaneously, reminiscent of missing people who's pictures stay on our streets and within our eye line, yet remain lost and overlook. I feel that I have accomplished that by my choice of placement, construction and materials, that all tie together the narrative I am trying to present.